I am not really criticising the software, per se.  BSD has been fine for a 
long time.  That is
why I still get kicks out of running, say, a
4.3BSD on a MicroVAX.  But, BSD is not the real
problem.  The sysinstall is.  Somewhere around
the time Jolitz brought out the x86 variant,
tape was forgotten as an install medium.  None
of the (Free/Net/Open)BSD's really have a decent
tape install.  Floppies in the old days, and cds
in the recent times, yes, but tape, no, not in
the classical installation sense.  We can boot
from tape, but not install, other than standing
on your head upside down going to school in a
blizard snowstorm in both directions, manually.
If NetBSD is supposed to be supporting legacy
hardware (and that IS one of our selling points,
right?) then it might be a nice pipedream to
maybe someday have a working tape install.
Yeah, it ain't high priority, but for those
odd legacy machines, typically VAXen and Sun2/3
sorts of machines, it might be nice.  If I were
a better coding geek, I might take a wack at it,
but, I am mostly an old hardware buzzard with
a bit of FORTRAN and just enough C to muddle in.
So, it really ain't my forte.  But, there is a
space in the go-fetchum-tarballs section of the
sysinstall that a real tape install could be
melded into...with a little thought and a few
lines of code.

Thanks

Bob

(Anyone else still use boot tapes, or am I the
 sole holdout?)