I don't develop on FreeBSD either, its just for prod.
You could use nanoBSD in the source tree to create a minimal mostly immutable image with your application. It will still be like a VM though and need deployed somewhere (this is how i run my DNS servers at home, they are about 120MB each and can run on pretty much any VM host (or bare metal)). But docker does have that market better (hence why i have a small swarm at home to play on).
There is also docker for FreeBSD, still in testing but works pretty good it you build your own native images. I build a memcached image and was running that for a while.
IBM/Lenovo xSeries servers are the same. 5+ minutes to get through the boot process, due to all the hardware init and checking. That's with UEFI too. ;)
How did they get lost?
Fast forward to 2018 and i manage around 500 Redhat servers here. About 150 are at RHEL7 (the others need to be upgraded). So learning systemd is a requirement, it is not going away. I like some points of it. I do like the jounrnalctl command and the ease of looking at logs, however being the hypocrite i am i despise the binary logs and non compatibility with most syslogging devices (i have had to explain lost logs during an audit with systemd and it was not pleasant).
From a end user standpoint systemd is great for my desktop. For the servers it is functional, server boot time does not matter to most administrators. On VM's both boot fast enough, on bare metal....some of our large servers take 5 to 7 minutes to post (thanks HP) so the OS taking 20 to 30 seconds longer to boot is not a big deal.
I follow the systemd mailing list to see what is going on, i think if the guys over there were not as abrasive in some of their answers things would be smoother, and more receptive to the needs of some of the users. I see a lot of features that are desktop specific and that seems to be where their development lies for the most part, desktops and servers are two different beasts.
I guess the infighting just sucks, i am not a fan of systemd simply because i like a simple OS with minimal features to accomplish my objectives, however it is here to stay and i am a Linux Admin so it is part of my job and i learned to use it and keep up with development.
I still use FreeBSD for all my home servers (except my docker swarm), old habits die hard.