In theory the original ideas of your constructive criticism are qualified.
In reality it's simply impossible, resp. not a good idea.
Explanation:
You have already percieved the capabilities of a handbook are limited.
No handbook is capable to respect all possible individual needs, so neither give answers to all questions, nor may provide How-Tos to anything any one may want to, and especially is simply not capable to respect everyones stage of knowledge. So there always compromises need to be made by authors, and by readers.
If you think about it:
A handbook that was capable to deliver that had to respect
everything: all documentation about all software modules, and all packages. Just for this alone that book had to have dozens thousands of pages - maybe even hundreds thousands. And that was by far not enough to do the job. That was only for to document how to use every single module, software package, and the description of structure and architecture. It should also need to respect any possible combination of software packages and modules working together to realize a higher task. And above all this all has to have always up to date.
Such a thing is simply impossible on a system like FreeBSD + userland.
Hence the man pages.
Any one wants to object may think about it:
The idea of man pages are: Every single piece of the system - module, package, etc. - gets its own documentation, is maintained by its developers/maintainers, and being delivered as part of each software package. This way at least all documentation about all software is always available as a centralized complete collection on every machine, even when there is no internet connectionn. If the developers don't write/update the docu of their software who else shall it do? On what base? Man pages are the only way to provide having everything documentated up to date - nothing and nobody else can provide this task - mission impossible.
Man pages are the foundation of all proceeding documentation, including How-Tos, and even the handbook.
So:
Learn how to read and use man pages. They are very brief, but almost everything is in there.
Developers: Write and update man pages!
In my eyes nothing without a man page should be allowed on a unixlike system.
But that's no answer for the How-Tos.
You may ask somebody else to fulfill your personal wishes, but don't expect to receive reliably usable answers unless you pay for it. The other way is people writing How-Tos about the things they accomplished themselves, and publish them.
There are already a lot. And yes it may a good idea to have some kind of a centralized collection where it's all available. One there already is
FreeBSD Wiki which 'simply' needs to be feeded, and cultivated.
Other sources are several personal webpages you may stumble over when search the internet, or just read this forums.
I don't give my list here, cause it's simply not complete, could be felt as 'unfair', as I'd prefer some one, but above all this post should not be a starting point to get to those.
Which brings me to the last point of your request:
The forums are no good choice to collect How-Tos.
Once in a while How-Tos are published here, which is a good thing. This way How-Tos can be reviewed, discussed, and improved.
But the forums is no good place to keep them. They need to be put in a final form, such as HTML into the Wiki, as kind of a how-to man page, a pdf file, or something else. But just having them in the forums only is no good idea.
The forums is permanently in flow. It's ment to discuss certain things, and solve certain individual problems. When you look at the amount of individual problems dicussed and solved here, ask yourself the question: Is it worth to make a How-To from everything? No, of course not.
You will find and learn
a lot of valuable stuff here, if you search and read it. But a forum is no proper way to have knowledge preserved for general usage. Its knowledge is within raw form, spreaded over several posts, not seldom even threads, all being in the time flow of the forums. A forum is no library, and no Wiki neither.
Anyone wants to object to this just may see there are several questions being asked repeatedly over and over again.
Hence the FAQs. Also some one needs to actively take the things out of the forum's context, and put it in the FAQs - ... and they need to be read, before asked again.
For any of your needs you don't find a suitable blue print solution, you have two options:
A) Reconsider, if you cannot live with another solution for which a How-To is available.
B) Find, or develop your own solution. Be an engineer! That's the essential point of Unix philosophy, that's exactly why there shall be small modules which doing one thing but being capable to be concatenated. That's the only way to provide maximum efficiency at most flexibility while tailoring most individual solutions. That's exactly why jack-of-all-trades tools are never a good choice. But they always sell good. Because people hang on to the misbelief it was easier to have and learn a complex monster tool of which's features they only need 1%, instead of learning the way how to combine small specialized modules accomplishing their task often even better, but which also presupposes to define first what actually needs to be done exactly. Which was a complicated sentence for saying: 'pay for to avoid thinking.'
If you found your solution for there is no How-To, yet, be a buddy, write one, and safe it in a proper place where it can be found!
