Why people don't test development distributions

Rawhide has been especially nasty lately, probably because the Fedora 11 cycle was stretched over-long. The prelink bug was probably the worst rawhide crash in the past five years (even normal distro rescue tools could not manage it).

You can have a pretty good idea of rawhide's level of brokeness by checking the blocker list for next release (if only people could be more proactive in keeping it current)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=F12Blocker

(and this has *nothing* to do with the packaging tools used, every single big problem rawhide hit lately was in upstream code)

Development distributions are always on the edge of the knife. If people make an effort to use them, report bugs (and maintainers make the effort to fix them at once not procastinate because it's a devel release "no one cares about") you have a virtuous circle. If not problems snowball quickly.