My impression of systems like soups/OpenDoc/component systems/etc is that they're doomed to failure because they don't respect Conway's law. The app model works because each app has its own development team and teams aren't directly editing other teams' data.
They don't have the proper expertise and will break something, because it's not possible to enforce data consistency well enough. (Apple's modern OO database is called CoreData, has a pedigree from WebObjects, and its consistency features are pretty hard to use in practice.)
