Do you ever wonder why Android phones don't get updates to new Android releases? It's the kernel and all of the vendor-specific hacks that makers do to the kernels they ship. A microkernel could make a big improvement on that problem.

We should be encouraging vendors to release the source to their binary blobs instead of making it easier for them.

This has been the mantra since the first proprietary drivers for Linux. They still don't do it, so we can keep banging head against that wall, or try something else that would actually work.