Please, try learning something new instead of getting stuck on the first thing you found when you first entered the industry and spitting all over everything else. Go look through the conference proceedings, even from Sun's glory years, and you'll find plenty of papers from people elsewhere that have had a far more profound effect on software practice today. This fanboi behavior does nobody any good, least of all you.
Yes I'm a big fan of their work, not least because their products work damn well, especially when solutions in GNU/Linux are compared to theirs. Did they screw up over the years? Yes they did, the USB subsystem in Solaris is an infamous fuck-up of epic proportions. Ironically it has nothing to do with distributed systems. But the things they really put effort into like Sun clustering, NFS and networking work and work damn well.
As for me and learning something new, I do that all of the time. The problem is that most of the new things coming out aren't new at all and certainly aren't better.
And you know what, for a passionate computer enthusiast, I'm sick and tired of IT and all this bullshit.
It's like watching an Amiga demo: one has to understand how hard it was to code the effect to appreciate it -- a normal person off of the street just sees some graphics and hears some music. Sun engineers not only did great things well, but they popularized them too because they wrote intimate diaries in the open about their work over the span of ten years. They raised an entire generation of IT professionals and taught them what it takes and what it means to be an engineer.
I wish I knew who the engineer(s) behind SGI inst(1M) is(were), but unfortunately I don't because they never put names and faces on their products.