> You don't need a special, weird distro to run openbox
I'm aware of this.
> it takes some configuration to be useable
Therein lies the problem. Even Crunchbang's default config is not exactly what I want, but I can go from vanilla #! to :) much faster than from vanilla Debian. I've built up a whole desktop with Debian and openbox before and I learned a lot, but it wasn't too pretty and it took a lot of work. Crunchbang isn't that weird at all, they hardly even package anything but a few skins to make it all look nice, and a few scripts to smooth out some rough spots in Debian. Aside from that, all #! provides for you is time-saving preconfig. I'm not one of those unixporn guys who wants to tweak and tweak their desktop all the time, if it's done well for me I'll use that, and #! is done well.