If you just don't care about GUIs or tools to hold your hand to configure things as you're saying, then BSD and Slackware are your choices. Slackware is more BSD like than other distros, and BSD doesn't.... I don't think there is anything to really configure your system other than Vi. By default you have no GUI much like Slackware, which you can of course set yourself to have a GUI by default...

And of course, BSD by default after install, there is no sound. You have to do a small edit to one of the boot files after you do kldload_snd and then cat /dev/snd or something like that (Can't remember the exact one, I did it for my laptop a while ago and haven't since) but basically you won't have sound or anything without setting that up with Vi.

BSD also uses Csh instead of Bash by default. Bash is available as are like 40 other shells in the ports, but by default you have Csh.