Some comments based on a number of points by Rick Moen........
You haven't been using GRUB nearly that long.
Quite right. And I've been seriously tempted to give that piece of junk the heave-ho and go back to lilo. (On EFI, there's elilo.)
It wasn't broken, and I am annoyed by distros fixing what wasn't broken. (Your mileage may differ.)
Lilo is still availible on Debian under "expert install" and works very well. I dislike grub greatly and have always had problems with it. Lilo is simple and I understand it and its limitations very well. The more complex something is made the chances it has to breakdown in some way!
having multiple drive controller technologies - sata and sas, for example - is not at all uncommon.
I've already stated my view that this is something to avoid (concerning main storage) if reasonably possible - and also stated that my view applies within the scope of the usage scenarios I've found myself in over the past 21 years of Linux use. I've also said that I think it's a great idea to, at minimum, retain UUID-based lines in one's /etc/fstab as comments in case the information therein is ever needed.
I used for a while the combination of SCSI (3 hard drives) and a PATA data drive. (reason for this set up was large scsi drives being difficult to get) It for most part was not satisfactory, the Linux kernel having some kind of built in bias far PATA. For instance when uodating the kernel with lilo one had to unplug the PATA otherwise the lilo command would fail. As for UUID's I do not use them mainly for the reasons given by Craig and have never really had any problems. As for UUID's there is little info about them and how to use them and in a recent experiment one a system using them.... On a UUID enabled system (before I changed it back to using device's) I swapped a pair disks between devices. On reboot system failed as it could not mount the drives. I had assumed according to the UUID docs that the drives would be mounted according to UUID to mount point mapping given in fstab, this did not occur. Lindsay