I believe these are the major problems of FreeBSD: no minor releases to give users fixes from STABLE or HEAD, no packages for the base system to make update installation trivial, TCP and networking stacks lag behind those found in modern Linux kernels, many features lag behind those found in Linux, pf lags behind OpenBSD's pf, some tools and problems haven't changed in years, bhyve isn't production ready, CAM target is a toy when compared to what COMSTAR is providing for iSCSI and SRP (no LUN masking, per-port configuration or initiator grouping), jails are no match for Solaris zones.

PC-bsd, pfsense and freenas use patches from STABLE and HEAD to get things done, they can't use unpatched FreeBSD because it's not meeting their needs.

You seem to be working on 8.5, 9.4 or 10.2 and the others don't see a release until you're done with the one you're focusing on.

I'm using 9.3 right now. I had to wait until you were done with 10.1, hoping FreeBSD 9.4 will be next.

There's no way to plan anything around FreeBSD's release or development process. There's no telling if your new FreeBSD version is going to be stable or not, a driver from STABLE might be more stable than the same driver from RELEASE.

Many live systems are lagging behind with FreeBSD updates because updating those systems can lead to extended downtime due to potential bugs in drivers or a potential breakage caused by the merging of conf files.