Bhyve seemed complex to me, because I was accustomed to Virtualbox and VMware. I tried to boot up ubuntu server with behyve and finding the kernel images, loading them, typing the boot commands were a hassle. Maybe if I had some prior experience with hypervisors, I could better understand behyve.
As for ZFS, I always had extra space in my SSD, so compression was of little use to me. My FreeBSD system only used 30-40 GB of space (including downloads). I had 8 Gigabytes of RAM, but FreeBSD only needed 1.4 GB, even whilst browsing.
I haven't used the snapshot feature, although I imagine it's powerful. I also haven't made use of FreeBSD jails, which are, according to what I read, far better than chroot.
the bhyve command shipping with FreeBSD is a bit lower level, sure. There are more user-friendly front-ends like https://github.com/pr1ntf/iohyve and http://chyves.org
Some might say "most primitive ever".
Closing the lid is a non-issue, see sysctl hw.acpi.lid_switch_state.
A more serious problem is that some Thinkpads just don't wake up https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics/issu... :(
This was already mentioned here but what's up with people thinking that ZFS is only for large storage arrays? You don't need anything more than a small SSD to get the benefits of snapshots, compression, and general ZFS reliability (copy on write — no data corruption ever, except for like hardware bugs). Boot Environments is an especially great snapshot-based feature.
Also how is bhyve complex? It's the simplest hypervisor ever.