I’m really enamored of UEFI. Although, TBH I’m not clear anymore on the various layers of the boot cycle from BIOS to init.

I, too, spent many hours deciphering which grub mapping represented my boot partition, and which commands I needed to get a successful boot. And then distros made it worse by adding layers of convoy based grub config generators, and each one did it differently, and I completely lost the thread of how to configure grub - sure, I could get it to boot from the grub shell, but it was nearly impossible for any distro to figure out how to persist a grub configuration, without spending a day tracing down that the grub menu was aktually generated by some distro-specific package that put some of the configuration in /etc, and some in /usr/lib, and to regenerate the initrd and menu you had to run different commands that did stuff that eventually just ran mkinitrd.

I am not a distro-hopper per se, but this was infuriating enough that I was happy to see UEFI come along, and I think I’m getting to the point where I’m starting to almost be on the verge of understanding it. And the use of blkids to identify partitions is a beautiful thing. And it seems to work better - more reliably. I noticed that when I got a little micro computer recently for a project and when I went to install from the boot USB and it said “no UEFI support detected” I actually groaned. And after installing using grub, I couldn’t get it to boot past the BIOS. Fortunately, something I did in the BIOS allowed UEFI to be detected on my next install try, and everything went smoothly thereafter.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with grub itself, but all these distros add so much “convenience” crap on top I think it’s just made using grub fragile again.