I am not sure people would switch to VMS to fix this, unless it did what they need to do. Or Windows for that matter.

This is something that Linux and most other systems have to improve. Sysadmin cost is the highest cost of any OS, and the fact that linux is free-as-in-beer is really a pretty minor part of the cost equation right now.

To my mind, unless you do want to do a lot of things yourself, you need to pick a popular distribution. There is strength in numbers in any OS. With a popular distro (Ubuntu/debian, Fedora, SuSE) what you're going to get is a large body of people who have been through your problems, and already solved it. That's in part of what people like about the package systems -- on a big, popular distro, if there is some software you want, it is more likely to be in the package system so somebody has done the work of configuring and testing it on your system.

But we can do better.