I tend to focus a lot on having a clear purpose, just because I meet so many devs that don't quite understand how an non-tinkerer types see computing, and why the rest of us like Android, Web, Ubuntu, and Snap so much.
I have a hard time imagining someone making even a super polished derivative end users would want, but that's perfectly fine if the audience is hobbyists with a deep interest in OS stuff, and I wouldn't be surprised if the actual mainstream distros adopt some of the ideas if you discover something relevant to everyday use.
i do like freebsd, i used it for around a decade so it probably left some mark (just like other systems i have touched over the years, like void and debian), but chimera does not try to explicitly be like anything else - i simply do what i feel are fitting design choices
You are spot on about this project I think in your analysis and I think it simply isn't ever going to be something everybody will want to use. That's okay, like you said, some don't want to participate in operating system development, you are mostly looking to be a user. There are plenty of free and open source operating systems that will mostly provide that kind of experience for you. The intent with something like Chimera is probably to dogfood these sorts of improvements so that other more user friendly distributions can use it as an upstream source in the future. So maybe one day we will see a more user friendly version of this.