Yes, this is all about maintainability. When you are on all fronts the last thing you want is to fight with your distro.

Slackware is a highly capable distro. It may not have the fancier things that other distros have (or at least not as simple), but it's just as capable, and it's highly more stable.

I was not trying to be mean on slackware users, nor implying that slackware isn't a capable distro. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough.

I implied that, when a distro is missing dependency management, it should be the last on your picking list. I'm an Arch guy myself, but my own servers run on wheezy (because 'life').

Everything has its uses I suppose.