> I could get behind “converge to a fixed scope, and polish relentlessly” as the primary ethos.

> Wouldn’t it be great for FreeBSD to be the first OS to have a release that was actually, truly finished?

By OS do you mean just the kernel or also the userspace?

Then I think the challenge is to determine what gets included under the purview of relentless polishing.

Assuming you mean just the kernel, then probably bug fixes are included. But what about drivers for new hardware? And when researchers at Stanford develop a new file system algorithm with foo bar baz properties? Or a new scheme for sandboxing user programs?