[apt-bunt]

I totally agree with you on this, and with Corenomical's idea that perhaps the need for the Crunchbang distro had run its course. I understand how people like the differnt GUI tweaks provided by certain distros and why people wanted to continue Crunchbang.

Continuing with Crunchbang just seems like a lot of wasted effort to me. The effort could be better spent working within the Debian project itself.

[not-a-hacker]

I am not personally capable of making a crunchbang-like distro out of Debian, and I don't like any of the many other distros I've tried. Obviously self-described hackers don't need #! because they can build it. #!'s userbase is diverse. And some of the more capable users just like the settings and can spend their hacking hours elsewhere.

[detaro]

Depends on how they spend their effort. Couldn't most of the unique bits be delivered as additional packages to debian, installing all the extra bits? Then it wouldn't be very much "unnecessary" effort on the way to the system they want (no shipping of packages already available etc)