But it's the core committers (and somewhat the Foundation) that influence the direction of the Project. By all means, use what you want to use. I'm not suggesting not to use FreeBSD as a desktop. In fact, I wouldn't mind if the Lumina Project in particular received a little more love and support from the greater community. I'm just giving credence to why things have been the way they are. People who lurk the forums and complain (and don't do anything either) aren't seeing the forest for the trees. For example, just look at all the Foundation sponsored projects within the last 5 years; very few of them has to do with improving FreeBSD as a desktop.
If you truly want an open source desktop, for the sake of it being open source; you're better off (hate to say it) with Linux. GNU owns the open source desktop, no matter how you slice it. If you want a good BSD Unix desktop, such one already exists.
I'm not trying to be an ass here, it's just annoying seeing "FREEBSD SUCKS! WHY NO WORK ON DESKTOP?!"-like posts when the situation isn't just "Linux and vendors focusing on Linux only". It's simply not a focus, and for good reason.
It would be nice to see the Foundation show a little bit more interest in the desktop area, at the very least, graphics support. Given the large difference in corporate involvement, developer, and monetary resources between the FreeBSD project and Linux though, I can understand to a certain extent. After all, you need to make the paying customers happy first, and by paying customers, I mean the companies who donate both through code as well as monetary donations to the project that help keep it going. This is of course how I've understood things and certainly not an official position of the project or Foundation in any way. Work is being done on the desktop though, albeit slower than some would like. Anyone that can help is encouraged to get involved.
I can only speak for myself, but I'm not an open source purist. I merely want a good operating system that has good documentation, allows me access to change any part of it as I see fit, and use it how I wish. For me, FreeBSD meets that criteria. Linux is also an option, but changes too much and too often for my liking and OS X is locked down tighter than Edward Snowden's laptop besides Apple's hardware being much too expensive for my taste.
Keep in mind everyone was green once and posts on forums now and again that voice frustrations and the like are to be expected in any similar project. Linux forums have their share, if not more, of these posts as well. It can be quite frustrating to spend your weekend trying to get an operating system installed on your laptop or server only to find out after two days of constant reading and tinkering that your hardware is just not compatible. It's always a smart move to match the hardware to the OS and not the other way around if you can. This goes for server and desktop use alike. Windows is really the only operating system exempt from this as for the most part nearly all consumer hardware, barring some hardware in the mobile space, is supported by Microsoft.