Despite loving the N900, there are several problems with software, including these four issues:
1. Problem: Apt worker causing load. Solution: Set Apt to check automatically once every year. Problem solved.
2. Problem: Thumbnailer Daemon using lots of power. Solution: Disable it forcefully by renaming the executable. Problem solved.
3. Problem: Media player is horrible(Can't add songs by filename to now-playing, auto-index never works right, not all file-types are supported). Solution: Install alternate player, like KMPlayer.
4. Problem: hildon-desktop eats batterylife. Solution: Install fixed version of hildon-desktop.

As you can see, these problems are a big deal... but they can all be dealt with! All it takes is a little manual configuration.

I -would- like to see a simple Python app for doing a lot of this configuration stuff - It would really help the command-line-newbs, but that's a topic for a different day.