Part of the tension here may be coming from the attempt to debate too many levels of structure at once.
One of the common factors that has contributed to the longevity of Unix (in the generic sense), and the Internet, is their layered architectures. The kernel does its thing, the shell sits on top, shell tools and applications attend to their matters, and as long as they abide by some standard conventions, revolutions can occur at one level without disturbing others. Similarly, co-ax, twisted pair, power lines, fibre-optics and pigeons can all carry IP packets for UDP or TCP, that might be VoIP or HTTP, and apart from some latency issues with the pigeons, the various layers don't care what's happening either side of them. If this discussion can be split into clear layers, (what gets stored, where, how, &c.) it might be easier to produce results.
