This is a little ranty (although I admit a fondness for rants) but does have some interesting things to say about the decrepitude/fossilization of the basics of Unix. At this point, we're mostly afraid to touch the basics, because we're unsure (or too sure) of what will break. Thus, all our new stuff is built in additional layers of abstraction on top. Even containers themselves are a way of loading the same fossilized layers as more layers on top of themselves.

One of the few exceptions is systemd, which just goes to show you that if you'd have to be crazy to try to fix the base system, then only crazy people try to fix the base system.

http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/12/29/fin/