I used OpenBSD for some years, and NetBSD for many years. And really, 'kool-aid' is all there's to it. You get miserable hardware support, basic features that other operating systems have for ages (unified buffer cache, journaling filesystems, anyone?) are missing, a packaging system that was nice in 2000, no decent virtualization support, and the security features are fairly arcane (no mandatory access control).

Unfortunately, this is all concealed by a veil of elitism (see parent). Expect many replies on how mandatory access control does not improve real security, virtualization is a flawed idea, and soft updates are superior to journaling[1].

All in all, it's more religion than science.

[1] NetBSD removed soft updates because it was, well, unmaintainable:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.netbsd.announce/399 https://lwn.net/Articles/339337/