It's actually not a fantasy. AmigaOS 3.2 was released this year as a commercial product, and Apollo make enough money to employ Gunnar full time and some part time folks too. Giving a niche community exactly the things they want will never be unicorn territory but it can produce liveable income.
There is also the open source stuff: for example Apollo have abandoned CoffinOS due to licensing issues and are now developing ApolloOS, which is a fork of AROS, which is an open source reimplementation of AmigaOS. Free Software ideas aren't as prevalent as I'd like in the Amiga community but they are there (plenty of GNU software was ported to Amiga via ixemul.library so they've always been there).