As to the "setuidless craziness" in general, it makes more sense once you actually have no SUID programs(*) left on the system - like we do not on a default install of Owl 3.0. This mitigates the impact of potential vulnerabilities in parts of ld.so, libc, and the kernel. Relevant vulnerabilities in each one of these components have been discovered (and fixed) in the past, and more are to be introduced/discovered/fixed.
(*) ...nor any similarly-privileged-on-exec programs, such as with fscaps with a root-equivalent capability set. We do not use fscaps in Owl 3.0.