Possible reasons for mandating policy: insuring interoperability, consistency, functionality, and desire to be a fascist jerk.
Why assume the latter when the first three are valid, and valuable to boot? Why do we require things like shlibs, or listing dependencies, or using .deb files? Why does POSIX exist? Why are words like "MUST" present in RFCs? Debconf provides another layer of consistency that enables functionality that few, if any, other distributions can provide in a quality fashion. Sure, power corrupts, and should be used judiciously. But no matter how much Debian sucks[1], imagine how much more it would suck if there weren't reasonable standards by which developers were expected to abide? -John [1] Almost by definition, all Linux environments suck. Debian just sucks less.
