It's neither silly nor absurd. I can't get a crunchbang-like setup from Debian, and many who can don't care to spend the days it takes to do so (it's not just Debian with Openbox... go try it yourself?). Debian's stability and security is sought by many Linux users, but the default DE is a far cry from what certain users are looking for. That group of users ranges from novices to the skilled users who are developing crunchbang's successor at the moment.

I am not personally capable of making a crunchbang-like distro out of Debian, and I don't like any of the many other distros I've tried. Obviously self-described hackers don't need #! because they can build it. #!'s userbase is diverse. And some of the more capable users just like the settings and can spend their hacking hours elsewhere.

Corenominal was somewhat wrong, however. For people like not-a-hacker, they tried and realized that all the customization that corenominal went through is more than they are willing to learn. It takes a LOT of time if you are a total end-user. Crunchbang has different types of users. No small portion of its users fall under "novice who wants an efficient, simple, but not Puppy Linux-puritanical distro."