[bane]

This is fine in the server environment where you have a bunch of machines you control and learning your distro's every intricacy is worthwhile when it's amortised over all the machines you own.

Which explains why most enterprises, once they settle on a distro, will stretch that version of the distro out for years -- all their technical staff will learn it, their greybeards will know how to wrangle weirdness out of it, they'll build an internal knowledge base how to resolve the particular 10 issues they have with it...etc. Once it's configured according to the 100 step config guide it'll run like an appliance and nobody will think anything about it unless some hardware fails.

For the end user, the endless twiddling just to get something running on their system kills any dubious efficiency improvements once it's up and running. No wonder folks are simply grabbing the useful tools and replacing the broken desktop OS with OS X.