I understand your reaction, and I would likely have posted something similar during my first week or so with Amanda, but I'm a lurker by nature. I figured the answer would show itself sooner or later. I've had all of my questions answered and then some. This is one of the most information rich and forgiving lists I've ever seen, and I've been subscribing to mailing lists of all kinds since 1987.
Yes, Amanda seems weird at first take, especially to people like me with lots of experience using conventional backup software. I find this very similar to the financial establishment's take on the Google IPO. Amanda is outside the box on many aspects of planning for backups. I was very resistant to it at first, being used to lots of up-front definitions which almost always needed revision later in conventional backup software. That is, most of the commercial backup software forces you to make decisions before you really know what you're doing. My experience has been that of forced failure. Kind of like an enforced first draft, which I've had to throw away once I knew enough about how the software worked to make a working plan. In my Amanda experience, I was lucky enough to have a large holding disk area and a tape drive which failed spectacularly before even one backup was flushed. It gave me the opportunity to see how Amanda works. The most wonderful aspect was how happy "she" was to restore from the holding disk. I still don't totally grok Amanda. I dump by hand about once a week. That totally works for me. I have two servers, one local, one very remote, and both have enough holding disk for two weeks of backups at Amanda's discretion. I noticed that the older backups were conveniently rolled off of the holding disk when I forgot to dump to tape for a while. I root for Amanda for the same reason I'm rooting for Google. Both shrug off convention, and both provide an excellent product to the world for free. I don't totally understand either one, but I believe that neither is evil.