But that's the thing. The real benefits from OpenBSD come when it's the only system you need. Who cares how simple and elegant the guest system is, if you need to maintain a linux installation to host it?

A project on the scale of OpenBSD can't possibly support all the hardware that's out there. And the system is under active development, so there are constant regressions in hardware support. That's fine for John Carmack: he can fire up ed and fix a kernel panic, that's how he winds down after work. But the vision that attracts me to OpenBSD is a box in a closet that Google doesn't have the key to, which sits there for 6 months receiving my email and serving my homepage, takes 10 minutes to update, then sits there for the next 6 months; maybe once every 5 years I'd need to read a manpage and port my smtpd.conf to a new syntax. Hardware regressions are what stop that from happening.

The OpenBSD developers are getting what they want, and good luck to them. The shame is that a little bit of coordination, where they chose one model of ThinkPad every other year and committed to supporting it for a decade, would make the system so much more useful for so many other people.