Hi Cedrik,
SculptOS is targetted to a "power users" public, but it seems to me this is really not a mandatory consequence of using the Genode "lego bricks" to assemble an operating system : you can clearly assemble them to make an OS aimed at a more general public, who wants to use the terminal as little as possible, wants the OS configured "out of the box" etc. The way I understand it, the three OS projects (that I've seen mentionned here in the past) all seem to be doing so.
I'm entirely with you. Sculpt is an example of what one can build out of Genode's building blocks, similar to how the fire department is an example of what one can build with Lego. The fact that the fire department is available as a kit that comes with nice build instructions does not mean that Lego can only be used in fire-fighting scenarios. It happens to be useful for ice-cream stands and pirate islands just as well.
(hopefully this won't result in a situation where only SculptOS users, i.e. power users, benefit from the full security model provided by Genode, and users of the other three have lesser security, that would be a shame. At my end eventually I'll try to live up to the awesome foundation I'm building on, though I can't promise anything this "early" in the game)
Sculpt OS certainly leverages Genode's security architecture in a very pronounced manner because it is meant as a showcase for the security benefits of Genode in the first place. E.g., the extremely fine granularity of sandboxing applied to the software-installation/update mechanism [1] shows how far one can go.
Whenever we implement functionality for Sculpt OS, we try hard to turn those mechanisms into generally useful components or subsystems. Should you ever happen to want to reuse Sculpt's installation mechanism for HoG, you can readily do so because the 'depot_download' and 'depot_deploy' subsystems are fairly free-standing features that can be used outside of Sculpt OS.
[1] https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/18.02#Installation___update
Cheers Norman