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.... not to mention baggage we never even think about that we inherited from history, things like having to manually save documents - why should a user be responsible for manually flushing a memory buffer? So instead of fixing the problem at the OS design level, by having a proper behind-the-scenes object persistance system combined with a more powerful FS, we just hack around it with "auto save" and other such things.

There are quite a few examples of things like that. Stuff we take for granted because everything has always used them. The basic windowing model hasn't changed for decades due to inertia, the "document <-> application" split has suffered some more attacks, notably from OpenDoc and OLE, but they both failed (ole through general suckyness, OpenDoc through piss poor marketing and general Apple internal politics).

Use your imagination! Operating systems could be sooooooooooo much better today if we weren't hampered by the fact that to be useful you need to be a corporation with billions of dollars or have millions of volunteers working for you It's kind of a shame when people create new operating systems from scratch, and spend years reinventing the monolithic kernel or whatever - it'd be more interesting (and dare I say it productive) to experiment with "operating environments" that take advantage of the underlying operating systems hardware support and play with new ideas. But hey, whatever floats their boat.