Stop comparing apples and oranges; automated dependency management is separate to the package manager. openSUSE has Zypper, for example, which does fantastic dep checking and resolution. Lots of recent innovation has been happening in RPM anyway -- the move to LZMA compression in some places for smaller packages and faster decompression is a good example.

It's thoroughly disappointing to see a team of programmers only able to produce releases for Debian-based systems – the "couple of distros" referred to in the story are Ubuntu and Debian. It's also a huge hassle getting it to compile because it's such an enormous download from SVN (gigabytes, I believe; I gave up when it got to 480 megs). Make it a little easier to test please, guys.

Interestingly, did you compare the Further Mathematics papers? I sat Maths and Further Maths A-levels last year. Whereas the Maths syllabus that was fiddled with almost annually got easier, the difficulty of Further Maths has stayed pretty much static; we regularly practiced papers from over half a century ago. That is why most quality universities -- while not mandating Further Maths as not all schools can teach it -- look highly favourably on it, and most serious mathematicians that I know studied it.