This is an outstanding post that deserves more than just a like.
I like yourself am a very long time user of FreeBSD, I have on many occasions been pressured either by employers or colleagues to move machines to Linux, because of various flaws, a lot of these flaws stemming from decisions been made (policy) rather than the code itself.
Sorry, but now You mix up to things which are very different.
The posting You have quoted talks about the "you get what you pay for" as being dismissive to 'peripherial contributors'. That is a
psychological consideration. Anyway, I am exactly one of these 'peripherial contributors' - I'm running FreeBSD since Rel. 2.1.0 because it is just damned good, fullstop.
Now what You bring up here is a
business concern. Business is about companies, and, according to business science, the only reason for companies to even exist is, to make money. So, "you get what you pay for" is the correct stance in that regard, as it talks the only language that is spoken.
The psychological consideration from above is something entirely different: it talks about people and their feelings. There is a rather new current in the western world, that each and every thing gets considered that it might be somehow offensive to whomever, that it might hurt somebodies feelings, or whatever else. This is bad enough, it's a nuisance and a plague and I basically ignore such approaches.
But when it comes to
evil, that is, when that new hysterical attitide gets exploited in a place where the actual concerns are business concerns, which, as we just learned, are only about money and don't care about people's feeling (unless it is for their own profit).
Most likely You didn't construct that line of argueing consciously - it is one of the evil habits that have become trendy. But anyway, i think it very important to keep these things sorted out.
when I first started using FreeBSD it was best practice to follow RELEASE+patch branch. Now its best to follow STABLE because the vast majority of bug fixes never make it to RELEASE+patch.
That is another matter, and the reason is that people are totally focused on tjhe "security" issue. And if it weren't about "security", people could run any version for as long as they like, disregarding official support schemes.
So, "security" gathers all the avaliable attention, and the other things go unnoticed. There is not only fixes that do not appear in the RELEASE tree, there is more things that never get fixed, there is features documented in the manpages which were never implemented, etc. Whenever I have a close look into the source, I wish I were in command of the dwarfs army of ancient Moria to have them tidyup all these things...
I even have developers who I pay money to even flat out tell me, they are in charge of what's been developed not me the bill payer
Oh, welcome to the new Agile socialism. *veg*
The famous psychologist Adler wrote already a hundred years ago about the psychological defects of a former factory owner who was not happy about being disposessed and put to the assembly line by the socialists. It's not a new attitide.