Most of the "standard" linux userland (in here i'm referring to the most fundamental parts), in my opinion, suffers from bad quality implementations and/or interfaces.
For example the current "standard" is:
Grub, Glibc, SystemD (and its companions), GNU Coreutils
All of those, falls in one or both of that problems, what accumulates to result in a bloated non-reliable system.

And a more general problem (this one affects any POSIX system) for unix utitilities is the lack of consistency, we are supposed to have one tool, each one with its own job, but we instead have a LOT of duplication and out of context flags for most unix utilities, a simple example is the recursion flag '-R' while we already have another utility to do recursion (find(1)).

We also have the problem of no co-work between the system; for example if you are using some scripting language to interact with the system that is not shell, you probably will suffer to make the unix utilities interoperate with it.

How to deal with those problems?
1-: Using alternatives is becoming harder, as software in general tends to born/grow in the same style, with little care about the "underneath quality". What alternatives you know? which of those would compose your "ideal" system?
2-: Should we ignore other things such as performance and "convenience" to have as much consistency as possible? Is even possible to break posix-compatibility and stay relevant?
3-: Maybe we should have a "coreutils-lib" written in C to give others language a way to interoperate with the unix utilities, or should they rely only on their own std lib?

What are your opinions in all of this? what things do you think that should change?