Yes, or one of the forks.

break a lot of backwards compatibility or radically change the current way of doing things

Plan 9. We can still have textual interfaces without emulating the ancient use of teletypewriters.

The things I've read (admittedly mostly from the OpenBSD camp) from BSD devs, they seem to not worry about corporations building from their source that much, instead they actively try to get rid of GPL code because it isn't permissive enough for their standards.

Theo wrote "GPL fans said the great problem we would face is that companies would take our BSD code, modify it, and not give back. Nope—the great problem we face is that people would wrap the GPL around our code, and lock us out in the same way that these supposed companies would lock us out. Just like the Linux community, we have many companies giving us code back, all the time.

But once the code is GPL'd, we cannot get it back."

If you are planning on adding things, my humble suggestion would be how to write a really good bug report, maybe going through how to research what went wrong to narrow down the problem, looking for already filed bug reports, using diff and patch if you have a proposed solution, using reportbug, etc.

A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.

There's an old saying: "Linux users use Linux because they hate Windows. BSD users use BSD because they love Unix." Obviously this is not true for every individual user, but I think it describes a trend or pattern.