Most of the time, I don't need bleeding edge and I have always found FreeBSD somewhat more coherent and approaching the future carefully, not hastily, albeit this may be related to much lower number of contributors.
For a long time I did not cared for the fact that FreeBSD kernel and userland are delivered by people closely working together but eventually there was an epiphany after comparing with some more chaotic OS options. There's little things like system scripts delivered with correct version of interpreter so you don't have code deprecation warnings during boot time. There's documentation in place - `sysctl -d [-a]` and you don't need tarot, system sources or 3rd party knowledge to configure parts of OS.
Linux is OK. If not for FreeBSD, I'd probably be using Linux full-time. Currently I use it virtualized for Docker builds. Linux is better for a lot of things that may be important to some but FreeBSD suits my use-cases almost perfectly. FreeBSD gives me this "right at home" feeling which I don't get with Linux and which I definitely no longer can get from a commercial OS.