ANSWER:

I have fixed the issue.

Immediately after typing out that question, I thought it might be an X problem – and it seems that it was.

The problem was that xorg apparently hadn’t been installed.

I ran sudo pkg_add -r xorg, and now each time I boot, Gnome2 is started and everything seems to work.

However, I still don’t understand why “working” isn’t the default behavior!

Yannbane from http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/76367