Easy Way Out (Score 1)

agreed - indiscriminate use of rpm can hose things but I don't consider that rpm's fault. Like any tool it needs to be used properly.

I see more danger in mixing tarball-compiled stuff in the filesystem and not respecting the proper guidelines: non-rpm stuff should be installed under /usr/local. (Rpms will not install there unless they have been created by someone who doesn't follow the rules) The main reason for this is because rpm has no knowledge of it's existance. Hence it can be easily clobbered by a package...

For what it's worth, I am a big proponent of source rpms - you can upgrade them fairly painlessly in most cases, they can be built on the target system, and they are a neat way to distribute source.