xinetd is superior in several regards to inetd, including numerous security enhancements. Considering that this is the first (and in some cases only) line of defense for a bunch of very naive, built-for-a-friendly-world, networked applications, I have to applaud RH. The distro has taken steps in the 7.x release to increase security (you might say they'd make the task easy with their prior practices).

xinetd isn't a default under Debian, but it's an available package. I'm looking at installing it following your comments.

There are reasons to dislike RH. This isn't one of them.