What happens when rest of the team does not rise to the occasion? You now have a happy but very mediocre team for the task on hand. Decision making is very democratic but seldom happens in time.
I feel you need pace setters but not excessively reward individual heroics.
Well, those OS differences taught us to write (or strive to) portable code. It also taught me to better appreciate strengths in different operating systems over the years.
Samba for file sharing? I led development efforts for the first Samba release on VMS (IA64) working at HP. It was not performant enough compared to ASV but we were on the right path.
I know NetApp (stack based on FreeBSD) contributed significantly to Bhyve when they were exploring options to virtualize Data ONTAP (C mode)
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/bhyve-the-freebsd-hypervi...