You have some fair points. Personally, I would not discount the conceptual sprawl of the piece – I think it's in some ways an unavoidable part of a solo project to re-think something as broad as a general-purpose computing UI. When I was working on 10/GUI, I don't think it quite occurred to me just how disconnected the hardware / pointing part and the window management part were. At the time, they seemed largely inseparable because I had this big idea of how the whole system should work, and it wasn't until I started reading feedback that I realized just how readily the window manager part could be adapted to stand on its own.

DesktopNeo has some more promising ideas (there's some really good thought iterating on full-height window workflows) and some less promising (some of the more awkward gestures), but it's a strong showing overall.