Thanks hardbop200! Partly it's because I'm the kind of person who just loves hacking on tall stacks. Before this, I was doing browsers for many years, which has many traits in common with operating systems.

Speaking more emotionally, I feel like *nix used to be a lot of fun and full of hacker's spirit, and it's just not like that anymore. Things aren't simple anymore, and they can't easily be taken apart and understood in an evening, like they used to. So I figured I can just make my own then, just the way I like it :)

If you like understandable tools, you might enjoy some of the projects the bootstrapping crowd posted to the page below. It's not very organized since it was just a dump site for work that a small crowd of people were taking inspiration from.

https://bootstrapping.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page