I tend to make use of lots of datasets on my machines, including in and under /var (e.g., /var, /var/backups, /var/cache, /var/log, /var/mail, /var/spool, /var/

I tend to make use of lots of datasets on my machines, including in and under /var (e.g., /var, /var/backups, /var/cache, /var/log, /var/mail, /var/spool, /var/tmp, and probably a few others I'm forgetting) and some hosts have multiple pools as well. I never had any issues with this on FreeBSD. Linux, however, was another story. Installation would go smoothly and without incident but I'd run into issues immediately upon first boot. I spent many hours trying to figure out what/where the problem was and it turned out to be race conditions with systemd and filesystems/partitions being mounted. (At the time, I had a few years experience with ZFS and had installed who-knows-how-many servers using ZFS exclusively, yet I had never had any issues with this. Of course, none of those servers were infected by systemd either.) Now that I'm aware of the issues I can work around them. If you just want a single pool on a single disk and a minimal number of datasets, you'll probably be fine -- you're right, that's a cinch to set up. Like I said, however, don't be surprised if you have problems when trying to do anything more complicated than that.