So, if you're interested in using a collection of machines to do a specialized thing like distributed computation, or load balancing, or failover, then a cluster is probably a better fit. Of course, Linux NOW has its place in clusters as well. After all, clusters have to be managed, and providing shared storage across the cluster is very important, and Linux NOW can provide that. We're never going to put out the flame wars. The best we can do is hope that people will learn to devote their energies to more productive things, like making the software better, and not let the flame wars get in the way of making progress.
Flame wars are an unfortunate byproduct of the passion that people put into free software.
When people are willing to spend hours and hours arguing about things, sometimes arcane things, that means they care very much about them. People in this community care very much about their software, and that's a big part of the reason why Linux, and free software in general, have come so far in such a short amount of time. People are willing to pour everything they've got into this. Given that kind of passion, it's inevitable that we're going to have flame wars. Debian is a volunteer project, so it's not like Debian is taking away resources from other projects to work on the Hurd, like a company might have to do.