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"There's not a single program in an unadulterated Woody install that a typical corporate user would know how to use, or would wnat to use. Even if they did know how to use, say, vi, what good would that do them?"

Well, at least you've now dropped the pretense that you're doing anything other than blindly trolling. You'd be hard pressed to find an editor less intuitive for the uninitiated than vi.

"And, I've never seen an outfit that allowed the IT staff to decide what software users run."

Then you need to open your eyes. To give an extreme example, many corporations have IT policies that mandate the use of a given piece of software as standard throughout the organization, e.g. Outlook and Microsoft Office, because they believe that doing so will help cut down on support costs. If a user's personal preference is for a different piece of software, that's just too bad.

"You wanna tell the CEO he/she can't use Office and Outlook? For that matter, does Lotus Notes run on Woody??"

We were talking about Debian Stable compared to other distributions, not compared to Windows. However: Crossover Office runs just fine on Woody, as do OpenOffice and StarOffice. There's also a wide variety of mail clients available to choose from. I think KMail and Evolution (to pick just two of the best known) are pretty intuitive, and Evolution's UI especially bears a marked resemblance to that of Outlook.

"Geez, would you expect the CEO and the board to buy a second-rate air conditioning system just because it made life easier for the maintenance crew?"

"Second-rate" is the wrong word to use. To buy a better air conditioner than is necessary to adequately air-condition the building would be a waste of money which could be better allocated to where it is actually needed. Also, I would have thought the CEO and the board would have better things to do than decide which air conditining unit to buy - they'd just let the appropriate department/personnel handle it. Oh, and if increased ease of maintenance requires fewer/less experienced support staff on the payroll (and it does), yes, I suspect they'd be all for it.

"Meanwhile, it isn't sad that users judge sofware quality based on "eye candy"."

Yes, it is. It's an entirely superficial criterion. The most important thing by far is that the program is stable and provides the required functionality to get the job done. It's just a tool. Eye candy is a nice bonus but far from essential, and a pretty program can still be a hunk of junk. Insert "judging a book by its cover" analogy here...

"First of all, ease of use and clarity of display is not eye candy."

I don't think such things as window resizing effects, splash screens, and widget translucency are that essential for either ease of use or clarity of display. Font anti-aliasing is debatable, but in any case the versions of KDE and GNOME in Woody do have support for this.

"And, yes. platform-specific installers might confuse people supporting multiple platforms. But, honestly, how many people really do?"

A hell of a lot of people. Apple hardware's pretty darn common these days. I also see a lot of SPARCs kicking around, as well as a few Alphas. Besides, since Debian's focus on consistency makes supporting multiple platforms easy, it would make sense that people who need/want this would gravitate to the distribution.

"I'd also like to use the applications everyone else is using in the year 2003"

Then either 1) get packages from Unstable 2) help out with the Desktop subproject 3) make use of the wide variety of backports from http://www.apt-get.org or 4) just bite the bullet and use what's in the Stable package tree. Most people would find the functionality of a one-year-old email client quite sufficient for their needs, for instance. Heck, the majority of people are still using the Outlook Express that came with Windows 98.

"and I'd like to use them on a desktop that doesn't remind me of 1995."

Woody was released on the 19th of July, 2002, not 1995. So it's really nowhere near as antiquated as you're making it out to be, especially in a corporate setting where the software typically has a three year upgrade cycle, if not longer.