Surprised there is not more conversation here?

>My vision of a truly Open Source system would be somethign that can
>be loaded and adjusted to all hardware, and easily understood and
>used to create beneficial products or communication interfaces to
>all kinds of things.

This is *every* supporter of FOSS's vision of a truly Open Source system. The entire goal of the FOSS community is to have proprietary hardware makers release the source of their drivers so users can use and tweak their hardware as they desire. And, of course, if the proprietary drivers are not released, well then we work to develop our own drivers that get the hardware working as well as possible.

>With this having been going on for at least 20 years that I know of
>why is there still no simple Open Source OS for a cell phone that
>can enable anyone who wants to a way to organize their phone the way
>they like? OK, that's a bit off the wall, but you get the idea.

Again, every supporter of FOSS wants every user to be able to completely customize their Operating System, whether it be on their Cell Phone, PC, Television, or even Microwave (as crazy as that sounds). Anyway, the idea of choice and customization is the exact reason there are over 1000 different distributions of GNU/Linux. ie. If you don't like the way one distro does something, install a different one, or edit the code to make it do what *you* want it to do, and how you want it to do it. Then, you can release your new edited code to the rest of us, and there's a good chance that someone else will like your new code, and begin using it themselves!