Open Firmware is not that scary, though!
i prefer to keep typing commands to a minimum.
it is an acceptable tool where there is no other, say like booting back to macos after you were in morphos or sth., otherwise i avoid it where i can.
I had to change the boot arguments on my 1.5GHz mini, else it would always boot into OS X, or always waste my time and effort making me "alt-boot" in the boot picker. Doing this was a lifesaver (and made booting into OS X more difficult, as I have to fix the boot args, but that's easy, literally just remove 1 letter, and I almost never need to boot to OS X anyway).
You can also easily disable netboot. Doing so will save you 1-3 minutes each time you alt-boot (boot-picker is now basically instantaneous).
But yeah, I agree with you, we want to keep it to a minimum. Like you said sometimes, it's "meant to be easy", and the easier the better.