It seems that a lot of people have troubles with the Debian installer. Once you know it well it can do what you want: tasksel is simple, dselect is powerful. Refuse to use them and you have a very minimal system that you can tune a lot.
the minimal system thing and the opportunity to do what you want is what made me switch to debian. i hate em automatic installers that do things i don't know about. that's why i don't like SuSE and all that lot... for all em users that "don't want to know why their computer works" there should of course be another option than switching to Mac OS...