That discussion and others have led me to the conclusion that the NT kernel has an excellent design and a subpar implementation (since only Microsoft's team can work on it), whereas Linux has a crappy design and an excellent implementation (being constantly refined and iterated by anyone). Kind of makes you wonder what could be possible if Microsoft would ever open-source it.
Here's [1] the current block I/O code from the kernel, annotated with the authors who last touched each line.
While I don't have time right now to actually go and count the number of distinct people involved, that's a lot of hands that have touched that source file over the years. And this view's only showing the changes that make up the current version of that file-- there are authors not credited there because their code has since been overwritten or edited by someone else.
