Actually, Debian's from-scratch installer is one thing I do like about it! It's certainly not as shiny and polished as (say) RedHat's, but it does have strong virtues for the power user. In particular, the fact that the initial voodoo boot-disks-and-dead-chickens stage of installation is kept as short as humanly possible, installing a minimal base system and then letting you reboot to run that system and install packages from within it. That seems like an unusual and odd decision the first time you come to it from a more conventional installer, but rapidly proves its worth as soon as you try to do anything out of the ordinary, such as installing Debian on some kind of really weird machine that doesn't have video hardware or any kind of removable boot media: it means that the amount of the installer's functionality that you have to replicate by hand is kept as small as possible (and also detailed instructions are provided about how to do it all yourself), and then you can boot off the new system and do the rest of the installation in the normal way. I have such a machine doing firewall duty and would absolutely hate to have had to install anything other than Debian on it.