In case you don't read the "book" is wrote on that thread of yours, flashing is the dark reality of the tablets. Yeah you should flash to the newest firmware (particularly if it is used), if you have one or more official images downloaded it really takes less than 5 minutes to flash the device with the included microusb cable.

And yes there are some buggy programs floating around in unmaintained repos (as well as Extras, I'm looking at you Carman) that may persuade or require you to reflash. Persuade is when Application Manager is giving errors that aren't true and you can't resolve dependency issues with apt-get because it thinks a package is installed but it isn't and you can't remove it because it isn't. While forcing flash is less subtle, device shuts off after Nokia logo. And in between would be the hard freezes that require removing and re-seating the battery.

In order to use screen rotate a modified kernel has to be flashed to the device.

NITdroid requires flashing the device (and flash the OS 2008 images to regain "Maemo")

Flash, flash, flash, how many times can that NAND be flashed....heh.

There's nothing wrong with flashing (although there is a limit to how many times you can - hopefully somewhere in the 100s of thousands) just remember to backup data (and keeping .debs on a SD card wouldn't hurt to help with re-installing packages). Oh I forgot to mention the Ubuntu port for the device in that other thread - I hear it's usable but slow. Now to sleep and stop being such an insomniac.