john65, I'm a pretty average user, too, but if you stick with it and follow some of the good tutorials on the web, you can set up a decent desktop BSD pretty easily. Here's a good tutorial for setting up OpenBSD 5.6 with Xfce:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK60CXKIFXc

You could also go very bare-bones and stay (mostly) with base, and configure cwm to look good and keep things nice and light:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9pyChAL4AE

I have just recently (mostly) abandoned Linux in favor of OpenBSD, and I like it a lot: simple, solid, secure, stable.

JWM is a decent WM, lighter than Xfce, heavier than cwm. A good rundown of WMs here:

http://gilesorr.org/wm/table.html

My favorites are cwm, spectrwm, and evilwm.