Obstacle two was taming my monitor. Oh, it worked fine, but it was stuck on an eyesore-inducing refresh rate of 60 Hz. There are graphical settings in KDE to change the monitor's refresh rate and resolution, but it wasn't offering me any other options. Again I had to poke around various places on the web, but eventually I found that running xorgcfg -textmode in a terminal (again, as root) ran a little app that let me specify my monitor's capabilities. After doing so and restarting the machine, I was able to run at a resolution of 1024x768 with a comfortable refresh rate of 85 Hz (it's an older monitor). However, I would find that, whenever I restarted my machine, it'd switch up to a higher resolution at a lower refresh rate. Eventually, I had to edit the configuration file (/etc/X11/XF86Config/) by hand and remove the higher resolutions listed there, so it would think it didn't have the options to go any higher. Again, I eventually got it to work well enough, but it was definitely not as easy as it should be.
So let's add some new applications to our computer, shall we? PC-BSD is unique in that it makes available applications packaged in nice neat installers called PBI files (**P**C-**B**SD **I**nstaller). You double-click them, and the app starts installing graphically. To us Mac and Windows users, this doesn't sound like anything special, but usually on Unix and Linux, this is something that has to be done using text-only console commands, and it's a lot less fun. (However, if you want to install apps using those text-only methods, or even compile them yourself, you still have that option.) the site http://www.pbidir.org is the main repository of these PBI files; there's a decent-enough selection, but some of them (like KMyMoney) are broken. Also, before the most recent PC-BSD 1.11a update, there were some that weren't quite broken, but still didn't work without some tweaking. Also, a greater selection of these apps would be nice.
Trying to get the system to recognize the card reader for my digital camera was not fun. It turns out it's quite possible, but once more, it requires a trip to the command line. Again, this is something PC-BSD should rectify if it wants to truly be a user-friendly free operating system.
Overall, though, the system is definitely usable. Some things are more difficult to do than they should be, but thankfully that's usually things that you don't need to do very often. One lingering complaint is that KDE still feels way too Windows-y. I've installed a pointer pack that changes the white-on-black pointer to a black-on-white one, as it should be (do people really like white-on-black pointers?), and I've moved the menu bar from the top of the insides of windows to the top of the screen, where it should be (do people really like having menu bars inside windows?), and I've changed the graphical theme away from that Windows XP crap, but it's still too Windows-ish for my taste, especially with respect to text entry (see http://forums.pcbsd.org/viewtopic.php?t=3913 ). I haven't used GNOME in a long time, but I don't recall it being any better in this regard.
Anyway, that's my story. It wasn't easy, but it was fun, and definitely a good experience. I'd recommend that everyone give it a try at least once; just don't rush into it. I welcome any of your questions or experiences with building your own computer.