> I think one of the weirdest sticking points about how ridiculous this whole situation is how they didn't even try to write this with that already-done implementation in mind, even after this was suggested by jason... It would have made their job a lot easier

Absolutely Agree.

The whole thing is pretty crazy and makes me lose even more respect for Netgate than I had already[1].

Also, as a long time FreeBSD user, it also makes me worried about the quality of other things in FreeBSD now, if this was _almost_ allowed to get shoehorned in, in such bad condition. Not sure if this is just an unlucky one-off, or a sign of deeper problems in FreeBSD development (not enough devs, process problems, etc).

[1]: the whole opnsense stuff was super distasteful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPNsense#cite_note-7