I read a story of someone that contributed to a BSD project, including fixes over some period of time, but later they ended up having to use a proprietary UNIX for work, that included their code, in a an intermediate, buggy state, but they were legally forbidden from applying their own bug fixes!
At the very least the GPL guarantees that if I am ever downstream of myself, I has fix my own damn mistakes and don't have to suffer them.
I am still willing to contribute to BSD stuff, but vastly prefer something like the AGPLv3.
Read above please. You cannot import GPL code into BSD licensed code without restricting the code distribution. In the other direction, you can do it and just add a notice about the license. It does not add restrictions to the distribution. Otherwise Linux distributions wouldn't even have OpenSSH in base install images.