Well, as far as modern design goes, I doubt many people argue that Unix was better designed than DOS. DOS was a single user, single tasking OS meant for very limited hardware.
While Unix was kind of Ok, when coupled with its common userland utilities, the whole often felt like a cactus. Possibly useful, if you don't mind the scars :D
I'm a professional software developer (well, "professional"; I have a part time programmming job next to studies), where I program in C++, compiling with GCC. I have never read GCC's manual. Expecting newcomers to read the 18 thousand lines of man page before trying to make a program isn't reasonable.
Of course, the man page is a great resource for looking things up, but I can't imagine many people sit down with GCC's man page and actually read it through.
Well, if the user had read the manual before using GCC, it wouldn't have happened.
Regardless, I don't blame them or look down my nose at them. It's bad design. If it's anyone's fault, it's GCC's. But it's certainly not a problem with Unix. This makes it incomparable to the system-level issue of having global filenames like DOS did, apparently.