(Author of post) They advertise this as a network appliance, so it makes sense that they use Debian since being able to install packages via things like apt ma

(Author of post) They advertise this as a network appliance, so it makes sense that they use Debian since being able to install packages via things like apt makes the whole experience much easier. A lot of career network engineers are not that savvy with sysadmin type roles, so something like buildroot would alienate their market a little