... come into a community without really understanding its culture ... Your apparent experience with Ubuntu (if I read your earlier post correctly) has reinforced the common, but false notion that "simple" is the same thing as "convenient" or "easy." They are not the same. Here, people are willing to sacrifice a little convenience for the sake of keeping individual things simple, and keeping those individual things simple makes everything a little bit easier for everybody rather than making it much easier for some, and much harder for others. It's a difference in outlook---not necessarily a better or worse one, but a very different one.
It is not only about convenience, but also about efficiency.
Think about the extreme difference between Ubuntu and maybe Gentoo or Archlinux.
The first one is extremely efficient in regards of the time required to set up and configure a standard system. The latter ones are extremely time-consuming, or, in other words, expensive and thus ineffective.
You somehow contradict yourself in this sense. For example, for the sake of simplicity, convenience and easiness, there is the FreeBSD installer which saves us the many simple installation steps Gentoo or Archlinux users have to do manually.
It's just a matter of efficiency.
Honestly: Would you enjoy installing FreeBSD if you had to do it the time-consuming, tedious and thus ineffective Gentoo way?
First of all you seem to assume making such iso image which can be copied to USB will require constant maintenance. But it does not. You do it once and everybody who uses FreeBSD benefits (benefits overweight the work required).
I believe this is correct. Basically it would mean an
one-time-task to create two additional to the existing about 20 makefile targets (for 32-bit and 64-bit images) and to create a simple bootup menu selection script which allows you to choose from the various basic boot options (base or full offline installation with a few of the most-used metapackages offered, netinst, ...)
You think keeping up scripts for making 20 different image files is easier which is strange.... Compared to making/keeping fewer images, but more compatible ones which would on the contrary require less work...
Some Linux distros offer both approaches. Two main installer images (32 and 64 bit) that can be burned onto CD or a memstick. For those who want a more specialized type image there is still the option to download such if the need arises. This makes things much easier for the users' majority.
You see, this discussion is is not about no longer offering specialized images, but about offering general-purpose images, too.
So that people administering several different computers/servers just can use one-fits-all image. Instead of -objectively unnecessarily- being burdened with maintaining different boot/install images even for the same OS release.
That's what people are reacting to.
Inflexibility and resistance against changes are commonly observed when evolutionary pressure enforces changes.
If you can't evolve you will only get extinct. You can keep finding excuses for not evolving, sure, it is your prerogative
Not evolving makes dependent of niches to survive in.
Honestly: Can we afford to neglect caring about efficiency forever until FreeBSD has become a fringe OS?
