I'm going to disagree with you here;
I don't believe I'm in such a unique position of having run both FreeNAS and FreeBSD on the same hardware (with the same zpool) so I expect others to chime in.
FreeNAS has been better from a performance perspective than FreeBSD raw was- why? Probably because I didn't do the right thing for good performance on FreeBSD. But that's my point here.. why spend ages configuring things to get the same performance you'd get OOTB with FreeNAS? You also get a webUI for "free" and plugins to run things like transmission and plex.
I don't advise using raw FreeBSD for home use, power users can still have all the CLI access on FreeNAS too, but may not want the "bloat" of a webUI.
I would build the NAS using plain old FreeBSD and I would indeed use 11.1.
If it were a week ago, I would have advised 10.3 as, historically, x.0 releases of FreeBSD have been ill-advised.
If you are comfortable on the command line I see no reason to use FreeNAS/TrueNAS.
This is how I run my home fileserver. It is also how I/we run all of rsync.net - ZFS filesystems on top of plain old FreeBSD.