Hi Russell,
I find your argumentation quite weird.. "even if there is an issue, there are others in the system". With your background, it is certainly astonishing.
If there is a problem with a flimsy door lock it does not matter whether the windows are secured by metal bar. The burglar looks for weak spots.
A subsystem which starts and stops networks, adds keyboards or mounts USB sticks, logs all information and shuts down the system is quite important and I do not like it when it is difficult to configure and may not work as expected or even worse not deterministic.
These days it takes a half-day course just to figure out how to stop DHCP and give a static IP address on a Linux live CD.
Compare it to a basic; "kill <dhcp_pid>, ifconfig <if> .." on a FreeBSD live CD. Worked since I used FreeBSD in 1999 (and I guess much longer).
Or how to disable a mousepad on a laptop: some weird XML file under /etc/hal2000/conf.d/NotANameIremember.conf.
Of course it has to be XML because this is most easy to ready for humans (or better: an adaptation of human life to the way machines like it presented)
I simply find hardware configuration on Linux systems disgusting.
And it is not really good if things are "too hard to understand" and quite often not really documented, and just have an air of "just trust me" around them.
It's also unsafe then.
No sysadmin should put up with this crap.
Regards
Peter