You should try it again as a desktop. Seriously, man, FreeBSD is really catching up! I can see what you mean with the exceptions, though. The BSDs, being less recognized, don't usually have any support for proprietary software, such as Skype and Steam. It's so sad that I have to depend on the terrible piece of software that is Skype to communicate to my friends online. Come on, you can get something as sensitive as someone's IP address from just their Skype username! I try to get them to ditch it and get something like Tox, but they won't budge. NetBSD seems to be ahead of FreeBSD in the emulation department, and I'm pretty sure they have 64-bit Linux emulation. You should try testing if Steam works on it on a VirtualBox or something whenever you get the chance.

I'm infatuated in Free/NetBSD because of their file system organization, base system, and separation of base system from 3rd party software. I also love the ability to customize your OS. FreeBSD and NetBSD are basically what you make them (although NetBSD seems to have a bit more 3rd party packages in the default install, such as X and the lightweight bozotic http daemon (NetBSD as a whole OS is still is more minimal and requires less RAM for some odd reason)). The BSDs were definitely the 'meta-distributions' before Gentoo even existed. This is a pretty nice (though a tad bit outdated) write-up about NetBSD.

We're pretty much in the same camp, though. In the desktop department, the BSDs can lag behind sometimes (although FreeBSD seems to be very close to evening up with Linux) with some outdated/not supported packages. I was very happy when Gnome 3 was added to ports. It isn't yet supported in NetBSD, though, but it might work with its FreeBSD binary emulation (if that's even how it works). NetBSD also has Linux binary emulation, which just might work for Steam; may not, though, because the Linux version of Steam may use specifically Linux drivers. The main reason I jump from Fedora to the BSDs is because I just love source-based OSes, where you have the choice to install and remove whatever the heck you want. What's also pretty cool is that you can use pkgsrc on other operating systems, too! Also, even though it doesn't affect me in any way of usage, NetBSD is the most portable OS in the world, with a very clean Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). Make way, Debian; NetBSD is the real universal OS.