I think you are making a pretty big mistake by assuming we all weren't "common mortals" once. Nobody is born writing device drivers. But NetBSD is an excellent place to get into that, the BSDs have a long heritage in education.
By considering NetBSD in the first place you're already opening yourself up to non-mainstream options. By and large, NetBSD people are hobbyists, very few people (especially outside of Japan) are being paid to work with NetBSD. I don't have any computer-related qualifications, and I work in the industry _because of my NetBSD-related hobby work_, not the other way around. You're on IRC a lot of the time requesting help from people who've mostly learned by trying things, making experiments, breaking things and picking up the pieces themselves. You have to not be afraid to do that. There's very little "hidden knowledge", everything you can possibly learn about NetBSD is available on netbsd.org (the man pages, the list archives, the source code) really. Other sources aren't anywhere near as reliable. I think even if computer hobbyism, you might still find NetBSD effective for web browsing, which is where most non-mobile-app things are positioned these days. Increasingly, this is a world where you can get by _without_ using a desktop computer. That ship sailed in the 2010s. My life is organized through my phone, and I open my non-work computer for a few little things (working on creative projects and stuff like that). So there is nothing to "miss" any more. NetBSD, of course, does a very fine job at routing the traffic between your phones, game consoles, and whatever else that conveniently hides most of the "conventional computer" architecture from you. Many people use it in that role.
