jeamland
The migration to Subversion was given as a case where core could've made a decision and given direction but chose not to. Whether they're right or not is a whole separate set of arguments.
I think everyone would be happier if Gamergate had never been a thing.
The trouble with FreeBSD, as stated, is that like a whole lot of other community projects it's largely volunteer and its leadership is 100% volunteer. If we had more mindshare we might have more volunteers but then we'd need leadership to be more active.
None of it was meant to discourage you from using FreeBSD. I had nothing to do with the LWN summary but the whole point of the piece was to look at what FreeBSD could be doing better from a community standpoint.
The whole idea of this talk was about the community side of the project. I make exactly the points you're making regarding code size but that just speaks to the difficulty of managing a community looking after a codebase of that size.
I'm also not criticizing the pace of FreeBSD development so much as I'm criticizing the pace of its leadership (of which I'm a member, don't forget) to deal with issues that would make FreeBSD more fun to work on.