I'm glad I'm not the only person with similar feelings. I'm perfectly comfortable in Linux, but there's a certain ... uncanniness to it that's hard to pin down. FreeBSD (and, I suspect, the other BSDs as well) just feels more coherent.

Because it is. Linux doesn't really have a concrete idea of a "base system" like the BSDs do. Linux is more of a hodgepodge of components that are developed by different, and often a lot more isolated teams than we think, that all just gets integrated together. Which is truly an astonishing achievement of engineering, so I don't wanna seem like I am short selling it. Think of like the developer who work on gcc and the libc and the kernel, maybe some cross pollination, but not a lot. FreeBSD, the user land, kernel and even the libc team all happens under "1 roof."

After daily driving OpenBSD and FreeBSD, i can point the finger at the kernel subsystems that tries to handle everything under the sun, but with no clear direction and competing projects with different designs. Everything is three or more layers, each governed by a different team and interacting in opaque ways.

Meanwhile in the *BSD, you have the devices or some other OS concepts/subsystems, then a control layer with the associated management tools. Any other tool is either an alternate version, or a UI paint job.