Chuck,
sorry to hear of your travails with Xorg. Perhaps you will find it a consolation that I co-wrote and published an early (and trivial) X11R4 exploit ;-). Things have only gotten worse since those days! But still, I must confess, I have an affection for X due to the beauty of its design. The idea that your desktop is a server too is a simple and neat way of enabling distributed access and sharing. Which is endearing to my collectivist sensibilities, also!
The other day, ignoring my instincts, I installed Gentoo on a second disk on my standby Windows PC (the one I keep around, mostly turned off, just for use in those rare cases where a Windows system is absolutely needed -- well, even that is not an issue now, since I have Parallels, Xen or Q to choose from). I chose Gentoo since its 'emerge' system closely mimics BSD ports. Well, I should have trusted my instincts. After waddling through the 10 page instructions and installation, I found that the Gentoo installer had messed up the MBR on my primary disk. Huh? I didn't even ask it to touch that disk! Damn Linux! This weekend, I am wiping it out in favour of OpenSolaris. I am really fascinated by all the new goodies it includes: from Zones to DTrace.
I like reading your ramblings! Keep them coming,
--ravi