Exactly. I've spent years telling people about all these projects and activities under way. Thanks for the link to some I hadn't heard of. Microsoft's VerveOS was clever. Genode is most innovative & practical from L4 family. Separation kernels (eg INTEGRITY-178B, LynxSecure) lowered TCB on full virtualization (esp Windows). Minix 3 is nicely doing the self-healing thing. IBM's K42 pushed cluster schemes pretty hard. Oberon still gets developed (eg A2 Bluebottle) & Wirth recently put it on custom hardware (again). Also notable that Oberon OS has garbage collection. Azul's Vega processors basically make hardware, GC, and OS for Java apps. MirageOS making smaller, safer TCB on Xen using Ocaml.

And so on and so forth. Much stuff being done in directions that might actually achieve something. There's still hope for those of us wanting something other than monolithic garbage whose uptimes still can't beat a VMS cluster from the 80's and whose security is a measure of how convenient it is to hackers.