Jon Masters (jonathan@jonmasters.org) said:
If we put a bit more trust into our kernel updates, and can start making people a bit angry and filing bugs when there are regressions, maybe we can do away with that crappy crutch.
User anger really isn't a good motivator.
If you're really concerned about needing the timeouts when 'normal' bootup doesn't work, then why not write a patch that simply checks the time since last bootup (via mtime on grub.conf, or wahtever), and shows the menu if it's less than some predefined interval (say, 3 minutes?)
Bill