First, this sounds like an interesting project and I wish you the best
of luck with it.

As for your question FreeBSD vs NetBSD:  Given that your goal is to have
a bloat-less system, I would think it would be easier to fork your
project from a highly portable bloat-less "acedemic" system like NetBSD
than trying to pare down a bloated "commercial" system like FreeBSD.

> Now, my question...I was drawn to NetBSD because of its small size
(not much
> package litter in basic install...wonderful) and its portability. 
However,
> I notice the consensus online appears to be that NetBSD is mainly for
> academic use, and that FreeBSD is better for commercial use, especially
> things like servers.  Given that you guys are experienced in such things,
> and honest, can you tell me what you think about that?  OpenBSD is
> interesting, but it seems to have a lot of hiccups with things like
laptops.
> I'm not looking at it for this reason.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Shane Coughlan
> http://gem.shaneland.co.uk
> shane@shaneland.co.uk