Ndungi,

It's not a big issue, really. It's mostly to do with the "split configuration" of (some) applications that Debian has. For example, I want my Apache to be configured using only /usr/local/etc/apache22/httpd.conf (This is *BSD style) and my Exim to be configured from /usr/local/etc/exim/configure. You could have
s/\/usr\/local/s//\/etc/g but I still want just one config file, into which I can "include" and pull in certain bits.
For instance, I am an ardent Exim user and in the support forum, we had to get a separate forum for supporting those Debian Admins who wanted to adhere to Debianism, instead of asking them to just merge their config files into one and forget the split configuration.
Maybe this is not something only unique to Debian (I truly don't  know). It may be just that I am so BSD-centric, which may also be seen as a reason by others to "never use *BSD" :-)