Debian is my primary distro and I still consider it the least evil - but sadly only in contrast to what the others have on offer.

Their mentality to patch and break everything at the slightest opportunity is a big problem. Don't get me started on the mess they make under /etc with all their ass-backwards wrappers for apache configs etc. Motd is not even the tip of the ice-berg here.

Personally I've long stopped relying on anything but the base-install for this reason.

Anything relevant to an application deploy is compiled from source or installed from a custom deb (postgres, nginx, et al). I have better things to do than figure out the latest brainfart of some package-maintainer about how to scatter a postgres-installation across the filesystem...