Linux is a funny old world. Free is not free. You get the code for free and if you can't make it work screw you or pay people for support.
Yes, this is absolutely true. Good or bad, that's how it works. Me, I like it; I can work with that.
Linux was never meant to be free to the everyday user. It was meant to be free to the nerds to do with it as they please and as a consequence there is no high level standardization and unless you are an initiated nerd you get nowhere.
I dislike the "nerd" and "initiation" there as much as radar_macgyver disliked my use of "hate" earlier, but other than that (and the claim about lack of standardization), that is correct.
It was never about helping
other people, or giving them something for free. It was, and still is, about developers being free to do what the heck they want, without any kind of artificial barriers. The way how the licenses are completely irrelevant to end users, and only affect how and what developers can do with any given piece, should be a dead giveaway.
(Initiation is an incorrect term, because it implies that you need to be accepted. No, you don't, you do not need to be accepted in any way. If you want, you can fork the Linux kernel codebase, and go in your own direction. It is only when you want to work with other people, or use their work, that you need to talk to them. I'm definitely not "an initiated nerd", yet I do whatever the heck I want with Linux. So, you only need to be "initiated" if you want the already "initiateds" to work with your code, like accept your bug fixes or additions.)
(Lack of standardization is plain wrong here, because basically all of the internet standards we use are a result of those "nerds" doing standardization work; in particular,
IETF and the RFCs. Rather, you're just complaining that the devs don't bother to provide you with an uniform User Experience you have grown to expect, across all the variants. That is not standardization, it is complaining that nobody herds the cats.)
(Also, while I was tempted to write "Users just do not matter" above, that is not true either. They do matter to the developers who have users who pay them to do that work. The kernel developers also know that without userspace, the kernel is useless, so the userspace is definitely important. That has lead to pretty strict enforcement on backwards compatibility in the binary userspace-kernel interface, as well as on things like /proc and /sys pseudofiles; and in general, the idea that kernel changes must not break userspace. Those are surprisingly hard rules. Now, the issue with ZFS is that it isn't userspace, and any accommodation kernel developers make to let ZFS work within the Linux kernel is non-reciprocal with the onus on the Linux kernel developers only, and that flies against the idea behind the GPL license they use. The BSD variants, with their permissive licensing, are not nearly as interested in reciprocality, which means that community works with one-sided ZFS developers much better. It is funny to see how rare it is for anyone to make the most rational suggestion, which is dual-licensing the ZFS codebase to GPL-2. Somehow, it's always the "Linux nerds" that need to bow down and change.)
I don't care for getting to read the code that I don't even understand I just want the damn thing to work
Yup; free/libre/open source is clearly not for you. Nothing wrong in that. You get more shit done with commercial proprietary software, and that's that.
Yet, that's not universal. I'm in the completely opposite boat. It is trivial for me to fix and change things I don't like, so working with Linux to me is like being a kid in a candy store, or a mechanic who is given a full fledged machine shop or two for free, and given a free reign to do whatever they want in there.
The way I see things, is that the demands, elsewhere (but including in this thread), that Linux must become this or that to gain desktop market share, or the developers must do this or that because
X, is like claiming that privately-owned machine shops must all be completely automated because I don't know how to operate a manual Bridgeport mill.
As to FreeBSD and OpenBSD, I do recommend taking a look. Monoculture is dull and uninspiring, and variety always helps; and the differences may give you new ideas on how to solve your problems; similar to how learning completely different programming languages helps you write better code in any of them. If you can afford the maintenance effort, you can even use the variety as a sort of a security barrier, so that any security breach would only affect a portion of your servers.
They are just frigging tools, not your family members. Don't get angry when someone uses a different tool, or because you don't have the time to learn to use that nice free tool yourself and everybody else seems to be having fun with them. Only get angry when people try to use the wrong tool for the job and expect others to clean up their mess.