​Yes, they had different goals.   Jordan wanted to create a 386/PC friendly install - be a low/no cost answer to MSFT when the target was Intel HW that could be bought anywhere - i.e. HW purchased from "computer shopper".   [The port to other HW like Alpha would not come until much later]

NetBSD wanted to take the CRSG token make a solid system for research that ran everywhere - i.e. lots of different target HW - 68K many different vendors, Vax, Power, sparc, much less x86.  In fact, they would take back from FreeBSD a lot of the 386 work eventually.

The NetBSD/OpenBSD fork would happen much later in time and that was based on personalities and group management [that one was sad, but knowing both group of people, understandable].

BTW: Linux would eventually take much of the install work that FreeBSD originally developed - particularly in set up/install provisioning.​  At the time, the Linux installs were pretty weak.

I know in my own case, many of us were worried that the AT&T/BSDi/UCB case was going to make a "freely available" UNIX unable to happen.  Little did we know that if AT&T had won, Linux (and all of the "clones") would have been in violation of the AT&T IP - the trade secrets - and they would have had to be removed from the market also.   I've often wondered what would have really happened if that had occurred.

Instead, of course, a lot of hackers (myself included) quickly downloaded Linux and started hacking and moving linux from toy to something real.   

That said, I run the MacOS Unix flavor on my desk (and my wife, and each child), FreeBSD & OpenBSD on my servers at home, but progam Linux for my job these days.   

Clem