Is mutually alligning self-interests the best way to help free software adoption?

There are collectors of old things and a lot of them like new old things. There are people that want a DeLorean even though it was an an engineering mess, but some want a new DeLorean even though that's not their favourite pop culture icon car. So, there's a company that makes new DeLoreans and in the 50's, people bought old Model-Ts and suped them up with after market kits and called them "hot-rods".

I think there could be something similar with late Windows XP-Era computing, I think ReactOS would be great for people locked into devices that only had XP drivers and save them from legacy hell. Another target for ReactOS would be that hot-rod crowd I mentioned, I've looked into that crowed and they did a retrospective on Skulltrail, Intel's legendary Dual Socket 771 Core2 Extreme board and it actually holds up well with more contemporary APIs that spilt graphical draw calls on multiple cores. Those people love the Socket 775 platform because it supports years of legacy with some Socket 775 Boards having Windows 98 Drives and Windows 8 Drivers. I think people like os could piggy back off the legacy hot-rodders. What if somebody could construct a libre Socket 771 chipset IP Core (you know, a northbridge bus replacement) and support single, dual and quad sockets and support more contemporary and less expensive RAM so say if we integrated New-Old-Stock x4500HDs, it would more than likely perform better than original hardware due to faster memory. I think both us and the hot-rodders would eat that up. They would especially be interested if somebody can implement a clone CPU that would be a "Core2 Octo Xeon" later down the road and especially if we can make it 40 watts like the low power xeons. And of course have blob-free software.

I think Power is cool, but not the way to go and RISC-V is cool too, but I don't think it appeals much to average joes or hot-rodders. I like the idea of a total re-implementation of the socket 775/771 platform because old CPUs are cheap, but the RAM isn't. I don't think Dell will ever sell a RISC-V Laptop or a Power 11 Workstation and I think it's best to stay with mutual niches and they could possibly expand from there.

GNU was a clone of of Unix 5, ReactOS is a clone of NT 5. (5.2, to be specific) and ReactOS could not only be the new FreeDOS where it appealed to legacy and hot-rodder, but it could be a new GNU project where GNU does thins UNIX V could only dream of doing and with the Linux Foundation being in bed with MS, this could be our moment where we make presentations with a slide that says "GNU <3 libre NT Clones, but not Microsoft".

For hardware, it could go into Tesla style Phases:

Phase 1: Libre Chipset
Phase 2: Libre CPUs
Phase 3: Libre Laptop based on what we learned from Phase 1 & 2

(so, a drop-in replacement Thinkpad Board)

I think aligning with legacy and hot-rodders is our best bet because like it or not, the software controls the user in the form of legacy binary-only software, so there would be some appeal and maybe it could evolve from there. What do you think?