The problems you cite (and that I also encountered) from installing Debian are not unique to Debian. The *BSD unices are structured to a similar concept and have some of the same characteristics.
I have had the interesting experience of having my workstation at work being migrated from Linux to FreeBSD. I didn't partipicate in the initial install, though. But I did try to help when we had a server to install that wasn't behaving. The FreeBSD installation apparantly allows bad-block detection in the filesystem, if you enable that flag in the partition. But we couldn't figure out how to toggle that flag. And FreeBSD's installer fdisk in "wizard" mode is about as useful as using cp /dev/tty file as a text editor is. :-/
Sound familiar? It seems to have something to do with the philosophy of maintainence. RedHat headed down the path of Make It Easy To Install. Debian did not. Neither did BSD.
Wade.