The Blub paradox applies to operating systems, not just languages. You can only avoid the Blub paradox by truly immersing yourself, and I was making a genuine attempt to do that.

Macs are truly not right for me - if I gave up and switched to linux 3 months in, I'd never have known that.

Perhaps. Have you given the BSDs a try?

I'm dabbling with FreeBSD on a VM right now.

I plan to build a router/fileserver on FreeBSD at some point in the near future. ZFS looks sweet.

OK. On a grander scale, we should probably look into non-Unix operating systems more often, too.