Thanks and that is a valid opinion.

I think my problem at this point is this:

Every time I have to do manual steps for something that is a one-off [which, let us be honest, I'm not going to automatically configure a deb repo since I only re-do it every few years].

Yes, it isn't /hard/ but that doesn't change the fact it consumes time I could spend elsewhere if I had a standard iso from Debian I can just spin up on a VM or a bare metal server.

Atm, my major limiter is how much time I spend building/maintaining environments vs. programming.