Well, I'm much more interested in the state of the Userland, not the Kernel itself. And since Linux is the de-facto FOSS Kernel, it makes sense to base it around that, instead of trying to port the various compilers/tools that I've used to Minix. It's just easier to do on Linux, but I've tried using the FreeBSD Kernel, as well as XNU - both ended pretty horribly, so I'm sticking with Linux for the time being.

Minix comes with its own unix-compatible userland. It won't be as performant or featureful as the GNU versions, because it's designed for teaching - but I would've thought that would be what you'd want.