I can confirm this. Installing Xubuntu quantal took me almost a day and I had to do it more or less manually. If i had used debootstrap right from the start it would have been a way easier. The installer crashed multiple times at different steps. The offical installer image does not even boot, but crashes right away, and you find yourself in the initrd busybox shell. There is no way to use it unless you have solid linux knowledge.
After running into such problems with it so quickly, why did you continue to try to use it?
Problems of that sort were understandable in 1995, when Linux and the few distributions available at the time were still relatively immature. They were even understandable in the very early 2000s, when hardware support sometimes wasn't great. But these days, there's really no excuse for a lack of quality like you're describing.
