I suspect I understand our disconnect! I am looking at the GPOS as a tool for scheduling, driver interfaces, providing threads, and a GUI etc. I want it to get out of the way and let me run software. It's not something I'm intrinsically interested in, or want to tinker with, or config in a way that lets me break it.
We choose which things we want to tinker with and improve, and which we would like to use as-is for that and other goals. For me, the OS is in the latter category.
I'm afraid I don't understand why you see the things that you do as "tinkering". To me, automation is just what you do with a computer (and operating with plain text files makes that much easier than being forced through GUIs for everything), and before you can do that you need to figure out what you find annoying enough to automate.
We choose which things we want to tinker with and improve, and which we would like to use as-is for that and other goals. For me, the OS is in the latter category.