It'll never work

I take issue with your model :-)     
     
Graham Nelson, who developed Inform 7, described why the dev process     
wasn't open to everybody:     
      
<quote>Had Inform 7 been developed in open source, I am fairly sure it      
would now be an elaborated version of the superficial prototype, and that      
it would be much the poorer. </quote>     
     
Someone who puts out the first model will have people elaborating on the     
prototype, not necessarily refining or disrupting the model to produce a     
new one.  I think this is because developers don't have respect for what    
it takes to produce these models, and will complain about not being able    
to write code against a continuously changing model such as (dare I say    
it) the Linux Kernel ABI, to provide an even more concrete example.    
    
Frankly, I think there should be a universally accepted handful of books    
about UI design that developers point new developers towards; just 
validating the ideas of measuring number of clicks, time-to-task, facts 
about human visual and motor processing would be valuable.  These are 
something I'll bet very few developers get encouragement from the 
community as something valuable to learn.  
  
And my two cents about existing UIs; I really like what KDE has done in  
centralizing keyboard shorcuts, mime-typing, etc into the control panel   
in such a way that they can be accessed across all applications, probably  
even non-kde ones.  With KDE 3, they provided a slider bar to match level  
of UI effects to the power of your computer; AFAIK, to do this in Vista  
you need to buy a whole different version of the software or start hacking  
the registry.  So in that regard, KDE itself is a set of good models that  
can be complained about or improved.  So yeah, it could work :-)