Never really had any users, despite being an official port for two releases (Debian 6 and 7). It was a bit of a neat experiment, but that's about all it was. FreeBSD is a tightly-developed operating system on its own, and separating out the kernel to be its own thing in a GNU operating system just ends up with a worst of both worlds.
On FreeBSD itself, GNU software (including bash, coreutils, emacs, etc) are readily available via packages and ports. You can have the cake and eat it too.
I think the better option would be for Debian/FreeBSD (I spelled it without the k on purpose) to be most if not all of the FreeBSD base system with GNU layered on top - something like /bin as the FreeBSD binaries and /usr/bin from Debian and PATH=/usr/bin:/bin or so, and everything using the FreeBSD libc, again with glibc available but calling into the FreeBSD libc for actual syscalls (actually that might be how glibc does work on BSDs; I'm not familiar with that part of things). Basically, minimize the overhead and take as much of the FreeBSD base system as possible instead of trying to take just the kernel, which IMHO was always going to be excessively hard to maintain.
I considered that, but I think in my arrangement you can still manage it like a Debian box, including having the base OS in .debs that apt installs and upgrades.
Yeah, the ftpmasters broke their own processes to delay it for a few crucial months so that the Debian powers-that-be could force through adoption of systemd and kill it. A real shame, since it had the potential to be the best of all worlds.
