"Apply this principles to "improvements" that "fix" things that ain't broke."
I think a lot of the "improvements" are down to a religious devotion to running the same OS on laptops that we run on servers. For example, NetworkManager is a godsend on a laptop that moves around, but really painful on a server, where you might configure the network once every three or four years and really want it to come up as early in the boot process as possible.