to be fair that is the free version and a majority of end users will likely need non-free versions with driver support for wi-fi and such, with is relatively annoying to find.

What? There is no such thing as 'non-free' Debian. The Debian repositories do contain the 'non-free' section which is used to deliver non-free firmware among other things.

There are unofficial "non-free" Debian images (both install and live) that contain said non-free firmware, though. And though they're 'unofficial', they may be needed to enable even fairly baseline features on recent hardware.

Then what’s this?

http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-inc...

Those images are unofficial so no wonder they're hard to find.

I would not trust any unofficial installer. Luckily many problems can be solved with a USB-Ethernet adapter and later configuration of the systen, since the issue usually lies in exotic network hardware.