Well, that's an (unbacked) opinion, and I don't share it. NT design is not too bad (obviously especially in contrast with Consumer Windows), and especially given what was achieved on the first few releases (that was made easier by Cutler serious experience in the area), but now it is far from brillant, and it has it (huge) share of problems every serious users of both Windows and Unix based OS knows.

Now at one point, way in the past, NT was far above Linux, and some Linux fanboys existed that did not even knew what they were talking about, yet had strong opinions of superiority about the kernel they used. Now we are ironically in the opposite situation: Linux has basically caught up on all the things that matters (preemptive kernel, stability, versatility, scalability) and then quickly overtook NT, yet some people like to talk endlessly about the supposed architectural superiority of NT, that did not provide anything concrete in the real world in the long term and widely used, and that MS had to work around and/or redo with an other approach (while keeping vestigial of all the old ones) to do all its modern stuff.

What kernel hackers know to do, is to detect problem in architecture that look neat on paper. Brillant ones are able to anticipate. I don't even have to: history has shown were NT has been hold back by its original design.