2. That said, I also disagree that the BSD kernels are inferior. Linux is catching up to FreeBSD's network performance, but it is playing catch up. NetBSD, AFAIK, blows Linux out of the water in terms of hardware support, although it is behind on newer stuff. As to kernel interfaces, of course they're different, but I'm not convinced that that's bad. (ex. I've not used kqueue, but I'm told that it's far better than the Linux equivalent.) Now all that said, I'm happy to grant that Linux is certainly benefiting from the sheer number of devs they've got, and is a good all-arounder; less secure than OpenBSD, less portable than NetBSD, less performant than DragonFly BSD, but secure enough, portable to most hardware in wide use, and performant enough for most users. But it's not universally superior.
In fact DragonflyBSD is slower than FreeBSD in most benchmarks. I've always been under the impression that FreeBSD is for performance (though worse than Linux), OpenBSD is security and correctness (my favorite of the bunch), NetBSD is portability, and DragonflyBSD is for experimental crazy shit (my second favorite).