There are many reasonably good end-user distributions out there. There are not many ultra-stable server distros available; any change that improves the desktop experience in Debian at the expense of Debian’s legendary server suitability is an unjustifiable loss in my opinion.

Among other complaints I have is the fact that Lenny got substantially less QA than Etch. An example would be the xzgv graphics viewer. It’s not an important package perhaps, but it does demonstrate the problem. Major parts of its functionality (the image tagging and keybindings to next-tagged-image/prev-tagged-image among others) do not function at all in Lenny, yet the Lenny xzgv had no noted regressions or bugs. Worse, it took only 5 minutes for a programmer with no gui-programming experience to patch around the bugs and generate a working local package. If this is “end user values”, I’ll take an extra helping of contempt please.