It was great to have one giant config file, a simple init, and the portstree being better than even the AUR.
However what stood out was lack of GPU acceleration, shady Bluetooth and Wi-Fi support, and overall slowness.
You should stop being so defensive.
On bare metal, or virtualized?
> ...lack of GPU acceleration
Depends, for some older chipsets it was there, for me, then. Though I have to concur, that is annoying, when your's is much too new, and thus badly supported, if at all.
> ...shady Bluetooth and Wi-Fi support
I am a caveman and really don't care about that. Not even under Linux :-)
> ...and overall slowness
Yes. That was unimpressive. But went away after https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-kernel.html and even more so after https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-updating.html with https://pkgsrc.se/devel/cpuflags
( Could probably be done from elsewhere with https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-build.html also, because cross-compiling is built in! )
Lastly applying some https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-tuning.html#tuning...
That sounds all really complicated and time consuming, but at the times it wasn't. Because the base is smaller, the compilers were faster. Expecting it to perform out of the box without adapting it to the environment will lead to frustration.
A quick Google search would show many interesting aspects of the BSDs and especially NetBSD, from resource efficiency to keeping the "original" Unix alive on current hardware, but I suspect you may not the kind of person to be receptive to that.