The BSD organizations of today are more about researchers making an operating system for OS research as a field and less hacker idealists trying to bring a free OS to the people. Nearly all of the latter people go to Linux these days.
Linux and other FOSS software becoming popular makes using NetBSD a lot more convenient, not less. There's a top tier FOSS browser that will accept NetBSD related patches, several really good document editors, graphical tools. We can even take some driver code from Linux itself.