There was zero polishing appart from different background color and theme accent in their early releases. It was just a debian with package versions similar to SID with debian's experimental installer.

What they really did well and made them known very well is they would ship you cdrom for free while for other distros you either had to buy them from a store, download it or buy a linux computer paper magazine that came with cdrom install of a different distro every month.

That was a big deal when very few people had access to fast internet connections.