As opposed to Debian, the distro which chooses to break tomcat (a program which unzips into a single folder and is thereby completely self-contained) up into a million different pieces and scatter them randomly all over your hard drive?
To be fair to Debian, that's how it's supposed to work. You untar into /opt, self contained, while your apt install puts things in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, which means config goes into /etc.
You'll find most distros follow some FHS standard, although there's some differences in interpretation.
Yes, it's a distro where you can find EVERY setting on /etc, even if the software creator decided you should know to look somewhere else.
(That said, making the package self contained is the most sensible way for the developer to release it. It's just not a good option for a distro package.)
