Yes, they do suck. I regularly see and help people that are dealing with broken systems because of stalled/incomplete/broken in place upgrades.

Regardless, it's easy to not lose your setup, run the latest OS AND not do in-place upgrades.

Just put /home on a separate partition and you're done. Use dpkg to make a list and restore a list of applications (same with repos). A few files to backup and a few minutes to wait for the apps to redownload. Completely clean system. Same apps. All the while /home was untouched.