As soon as gentoo starts to create scripts for any crap I switch again to another distro, the advantage of not having tools for anything is, that those tools can't break. Look at Suse RedHat Mandrake, 30% of their bugs come from the tools they wrote.
Having tools available doesn't mean that you are required to use them. I don't use RedHat any more, but when I *was*, I would edit configuration files by hand rather than use the tools provided with the distro. One, I don't like installing a GUI on a server (it seems that the graphical configuration tools are better known in later RH versions). Two, if I have to first find and then read about a tool that simply writes text to a file, I'd rather edit the file by hand. I find that easier. (Finding distro-specific config tools is much more difficult on a CLI, since you can't just browse to "System Tools" in the application menu.)
However, there are probably hundreds or thousands of people using those tools in place of file editing. Seriously, do you still append users to the end of /etc/passwd with vi, or do you use "useradd"? (I do both, depending on circumstances.)
mickey
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