Re: FreeBSD is the best all round UNIX today
-> What you can't do is put FreeBSD's root file system in one PC partition, its home file system in a different PC partition and so on, as you can with virtually every normal Linux distro.
Not sure about that or what you did or what you are trying to achieve. I would like to see some clarification.
Early on I used to put / /usr, /var, and /home on different UFS slices, not quite the same as partitions but effectively that's what they are. Since UFS+J the need to keep frequently written partitions separate is much less important, sort of like using EXT4 in Linux... though on my server I still did it that way for uber reliability and easier recovery (the remainder of the disk is a ~1.5Tb ZFS partition). So yeah depending on how you set things up, you can boot from ZFS, have it all in one UFS+J 'slice', or use separate slices for different mounted directories.
-> In our testing, in a VirtualBox VM, trying to install onto ZFS failed
Again, not sure what you are doing here. I tested FreeBSD + ZFS in VB and it works fine..
I also have not had difficulty with this sort of thing, though I have yet not tried building a 13.1 system in VirtualBox. Maybe their VirtualBox drive was emulating IDE instead of SATA ? Though I am pretty sure that this has still worked for me (using IDE emulation), just that did not perform as well if I remember correctly.
Still there is one pair of facts that come out of their experience: First, you kinda need to read the handbook before proceeding with an install, and understand what it is you are doing. Second, you can always start over.