Nothing new really, Intel needs to differentiate their consumer and enterprise products, so ECC is usually limited to their enterprise hardware.
AFAIK up until recently you could use e3 xeons in this class (socket 1150/1155) boards, but they removed that possibility(probably because a E3-1230v1-3 is cheaper than the i7 equivalent), so now you have to get a motherboard with a "server class" PCH (something like c236).
Oh and with regards to feature bloat on server grade hardware, I strongly disagree.
While you do get stuff like IPMI on most boards nowadays, you typically don't get things like wifi and audio.
Maybe it's just because I'm looking for a specific configuration. Not too expensive, 32GB ECC ram min., mITX (or µATX in case it's a perfect fit), capable CPU for running some basic services (torrent, nas, webserving, game server(s) and just fun stuff). It's really hard to find, especially since I'm opting for FreeNAS because of its ZFS support.
FreeNAS is not recommended for virtualization as it puts your data at more risk and in almost all cases you'll need an HBA to passthrough the hard drives. I've been looking so much at hardware the last 8 months and there was always a 'but...' with each component. Using the Asrock Rack atom boards isn't an option either because they don't support VT-d, byebye virtualization.
Splitting NAS and server on the other hand is way more expensive, kinda stupid really. So many options, possibilities, combinations. It makes me oh so indecisive. I could go endlessly on with examples of why current hardware doesn't really suit me.
It's truly in the details with these builds. It's both fun and very exhausting to do the research. Last thing that might give me some hope is running FreeBSD jails from a FreeNAS, making a 1 build solution very possible.
Thanks for the answers, all!