I know the reasons behind that. But when I am given something that calls itself an official ISO image for a specific device, I expect it to be tuned for that device and work on that device out of the box!

Regarding your other points, thanks for that. I know about yum and I suspected there were some tweaks one could do in a system file here or there but we live in the 21st century and I would really expect a nice GUI for such basic things. There is for example no excuse whatsoever for not presenting some progress bar or at least a rotating clock, galloping horse or whatever during startup or shutdown.