Mostly it's a matter of picking your poison. dpkg allows some things that RPM doesn't, and vice-versa. dpkg does have some nice features (well, features I can't remember, except for I went "Ooo, I want rpm to have that" when I saw it)
One thing that dpkg has that really annoys the hell out of me is allowing for user input during the transaction. It makes unattended upgrades impossible
In general Debian/Ubuntu packages do not prompt the user with debconf questions these days, although there are occasional leftovers in old packages if you upgrade via a terminal with apt-get update.
You can define an environment variable, DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive, to force even the worst-behaved packages to never ask a question.
You can set those configurations, certainly, but it's up to the package maintainer to actually respect them. At my previous company, I occasionally ran into packages that insisted on trying to read from the terminal, even when installed noninteractively, with all configuration flags set to noninteractive. I can understand the potential appeal for a lone individual working with a small number of hand-maintained systems, but when working with a large cluster, interaction during package operations is just a horrible misfeature.
One thing that dpkg has that really annoys the hell out of me is allowing for user input during the transaction. It makes unattended upgrades impossible