Steve Litt, since you liked playing with PC-BSD before it suddenly took
a left turn into TruOS, maybe you would consider Illumian? It's
IllumOS (ex-Solaris) with Debian packaging -- successor to the
short-lived but promising Nexenta project. (I was a little more
enthusiastic about Nexenta, as that was the entire GNU userspace atop
the then-ex-Solaris kernel, but this is still worthy of respect.)

See Bryan Cantrill's LISA conference slide at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=59m36s

Actually, the whole LISA talk is engaging (especially if you don't yet
have enough reasons to distrust Oracle Corporation). On that latter
note, also, viva LibreOffice! ASF, give it up with Open Office,
already!

http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/2016-September/008550.html
http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/2016-September/008551.html

Illumian is here: http://illumian.org/ (Yeah, they're not much for
marketing.) I gather that they're not yet a mature project, and don't
expect anything even remotely approaching a desktop distribution at this
early stage. I'm just saying, if you're considering BSD-based builds,
you should certainly consider IllumOS-based ones, too. Among other
things, you get top-notch implementations of ZFS, dtrace, and zones for
free.