Where does OpenBSD's kernel fit into all of this? Isn't that, in turn, lightyears ahead of illumos?
But I will say the it's probably much easier to hack on the bsd kernels than Linux.
Taking FreeBSD as an example, if for no other reason than the absurdly great documentation, tooling, and developer community.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/16/0121213/theo-de-raa...
OpenBSD's documentation is also known to be a tad better than FreeBSD's.