Yes, this has been my experience as well, even at the kernel level. I actually enjoy looking at and hacking on BSD kernel code. Linux kernel code is ... anoth

Yes, this has been my experience as well, even at the kernel level. I actually enjoy looking at and hacking on BSD kernel code. Linux kernel code is ... another story. But I tend to think the difficulty with Linux/GNU is more a result of the enormously larger community and the huge diversity of use cases. For example if you stick with a complete vendor (Red Hat being the best example) among the system tools is a fair amount of consistency and documentation (man pages). As you accumulate more applications and extra tools, that's where the community fragmentation really hits. This is most intensely felt when I try to set up a workstation (laptop or desktop) with a BSD. Even discounting hardware support, I run into so many things where BSD is consistent because in part because it doesn't exist there. I still have a dream though that one day BSD will start becoming the GOTO for various places. Though, I think how Apple took it and made it common but also locked it down, I have my suspicions that the permissive licensing (which as a developer I really love) does seem to end up being taken by big tech to get huge profits and used without giving (much) back.