Exactly.. and this is the problem I personally have.

I have managed Mandriva, SuSE, CentOS/RHEL, Red Hat and Fedora up through 12.

It is a bi*** moving from one of the other of these rpm-based distro's and trying to find configuration files, settings, etc. None of them seem to talk to eachother in any way to determine how they're going to run their own sandbox and it's a total mess.

I have also managed Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Slackware, Arch, and several distro's based from these at core.

Moving from one to the other of these is nearly seamless.. you can use the (arguably) best documentation for linux over at the Gentoo project to work your way around a Debian system. All of these place things in a similar way on the filesystem and all "feel" like each other.

Now.. trying to move from any of the second category to any of the first category or vice versa is even *more* confusing.

Granted.. most 'users' wouldn't notice this.. but for someone like me that spends all of my time in a Terminal the differences are noticeable, and very annoying. RPM-based distro's have been annoying me for years.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the "RPM" packaging itself.. just like there is nothing wrong with the "DEB" packaging itself.. but for some reason: The RPM side seems to attract all the people that want to do it their way with no regard to standards of any kind... making it a nightmare for people like me.