in earlier versions, though I haven't looked at anything for over 2 years. I guess the methods haven't changed

I basically looked at what they were trying to do and used apt-get to install most things and ignored the ones that were blatant policy violations. In other words, I downloaded the automatic package and extracted it and looked all the zenity things it was trying to do, did them by finding and applying Debian packages from places like Christian's repository or other (well) known and trusted locations. I also tweaked many settings... that now cause upgrades to ask about "foo.conf for package gnarfle is not default, what do you want to do?"

Oh, but I did these on straight Debian and not Ubuntu.

On Ubuntu, I do the same things I did on Debian. Its a better things to use the existing package management than to got outside it. And doing this save a great deal of discomfort.

You see doing things like using Automatix out of rote can cause many a harmful thing later on. I like to know why I am using/doing something rather than taking it as axiomatic truth.

So I guess overall, I agree that the intentions of Automatix are good, but the execution is lacking, which is what I felt when I first looked at it.