I know this site was originally called start-up news, but going to a site branded "hacker" news and seeing a post like this creates something of a LMFAO experience.
Please read your own post over again, and if you somehow don't see the irony in telling a group of people who at this point almost certainly qualify as hackers to stop working on a project they love on a site called hacker news, I suggest revisiting the published literature laying out what a 'hacker' is. (Starting with Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution if you haven't read it yet.)
Developers work on things they find cool, not the things you need done. To get those done, you either do them yourself, or you pay someone to do them.
And let them work on whatever they find fun on their own spare time.
Given that mobile hardware is about where desktop hardware was when BeOS was invented, I wonder if some company could use it as a new smartphone OS. There's an unfinished ARM port in progress but would probably need commercial support to complete.
The thing about innovation is, it's not always possible to predict what will be valuable or not. Not many people would have predicted Linux back in Linus's early days, for example.
Now they can say "That's what we intended all along" ;-)
... for very idiosyncratic definitions of "the world" and "need"
This is an absurd statement. Stop wasting time solving problems that don't exist for 98% of the market. "More choice" is not a better than if the choices suck.
"Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened."
This was really cool in the early days of BeOS. But that was more than a decade ago.
People of earth: there is a talent crisis right now. The world needs great developers to build awesome apps for a whole new class of machines. If you feel an urge to "start from scratch" — help rebuild everything for mobile. It's a big job, there are too many projects and not enough developers, and you'll be contributing to a seismic shift in computing.
Stop solving problems that don't exist for most people. Build apps that people will use. Do big things that address 98% of users. These guys clearly have dev chops that I admire, so don't waste them on a project like this.