It's easy (and legitimate) to blame the failure of Hurd on poor design and management choices.
I think it's also instructive, though, to observe how no "better than Unix" project has really attained any success. Some of them have delivered more workable code than Hurd, but Plan 9, Inferno, Amoeba - none of them have really caught on.
Not very different, since we're basically doing microkernel-y things anyway using various kinds of virtualization.
It would probably be more elegant to just run Hurd or whatever instead of for example running multiple JVMs on top of multiple Linux instances on top of a hypervisor (yes, this happens), but them's the breaks.
I think it's also instructive, though, to observe how no "better than Unix" project has really attained any success. Some of them have delivered more workable code than Hurd, but Plan 9, Inferno, Amoeba - none of them have really caught on.