Holy crap, I've been calling for this for years now. NT is a great design but most people studying OS design get intercepted by the Linux users and get the "Windows kernel is old and sucks" misinfo implanted into their brain.
I'm not sure this is the case. Source code availability for current and historic versions is what has made Linux so popular for studying OS design. Linux, the BSDs, the Mach kernel and many other embedded and academic OSes more interesting than Windows. Incidentally, even in the 80s and 90s you could get access to Unix OS source code. So in short people study what they are allowed to study.
