This strikes me as a nightmare waiting to happen.There was probably a similar feeling when .deb and dpkg and apt rolled out.I think you made this up. I'm sure there were some people who were happy enough with Slackware when dpkg was evolving, but I never read of anyone using Debian who would have preferred dpkg not to exist. As for APT, well, using dselect was getting gradually less able to cope as the number of packages increased into the thousands. Effectively, the apt method in dselect came to its rescue. The idea of dist-upgrading with dselect is "Aaargh".
Thanks!
Sorry, my memory of the state of things around Potato when I started with Debian is very hazy. I remember dselect and a lot of fumbling.
Bijan