Without trying to flame against Debian - I admire the work of the thousands of volunteers which are investing time into that distibution, but:

Why the heck is Debian one of the few (the only) distribution which replaces the kernel when updating it? RH/FC/SuSE do install the kernel side by side to have the possibility to boot the old one in case something goes wrong. Also its possible to still load modules of the kernel running...