I tend to share your thinking on this, although at least one knowledgeable online-imaginary-friend vigorously disagrees with me.

I have looked but failed to find a VM image or even images of installable media to build one online. If you know of any, I would like to know -- and if you don't know of any, but have the skills, I think you could do a big service to the OS research community by making and sharing either install media or a VM or both.