I also felt a little underwhelmed, I thought the installation would be more difficult.

If you are not in it for the memeing I find it to be a great distro.

At first I did, but i really like vim now

Then it still doesn’t take away anything from you. How would an additional embedded web based control panel impact you negatively? If you don’t use it just don’t use it. But it ensures longevity and makes the device entirely self-contained.

Its still stupid. No reason there is no embedded web interface. That is such an easy thing to do. Like routers have been doing for ages.