That mostly matches my experience. I was following 386BSD's progress at that time and was really eager to try it for myself. However, the machines that it was

That mostly matches my experience. I was following 386BSD's progress at that time and was really eager to try it for myself. However, the machines that it was targeting (SCSI disk of ~200MB, math coprocessor) were out of my reach. It made sense that a workstation-like OS was expecting workstation-class hardware, but it did rule out most 386 PCs that people actually owned. However, I also agree with @wbl that the lawsuits were ultimately the decisive factor. The hardware requirements situation of BSD was a tractable problem; it just needed a flurry of helping hands to build drivers for the wide cacophony of PC hardware. The lawsuit-era stalled the project at just that critical point. By the time that FreeBSD was approaching an acceptable level of hardware support Linux already had opened up a lead... which it never gave up.