well, it's the bazaar vs the cathedral, isn't it? bazaar moves a lot faster. Everyone likes that part, except when it breaks things, and when they have to chase an upstream that's constantly churning, etc. but most people don't consider that a cathedral itself might have some engineering merit too. cathedrals are beautiful and polished and stable.
I highly encourage people to try freeBSD sometime. Give ports a try (although the modern sense is that poudrie is better even if you want custom-built packages). See how nicely everything works. All the system options you need go into rc.conf (almost uniformly). Everything is documented and you can basically operate the system out of the FreeBSD Handbook documentation (it's not at all comparable to the "how to use a window or a menu" level intro stuff the linux provides). You can't do that when everything is furiously churning every release. everything just works, everything is just documented, it's an experience when you're coming from linux.
and that forum post from 2007 on how to tweak a service script is probably still valid, because BSD hasn't had 3 different init systems over that timespan etc.
just like "engineering is knowing how to build a bridge that barely doesn't fall over", engineering here is knowing what not to churn, and fitting your own work and functionality extensions into the existing patterns etc. like it doesn't have to be even "don't make a bigger change than you have to", you just have to present a stable userland and stable kernel interface and stable init/services interface. the fact that linux doesn't present a stable kernel interface is actually fairly sketchy/poor engineering, it doesn't have to be that way, a large subset of kernel interfaces probably should be stable.