Indeed, but even with YUM, the process is unsavory and the number of sources is surprising limited. I ended-up just compiling from source because it was faster than trying to deal with RPM dependency problems.
What you mean number of sources is limited? The distros come with their own repos with a large selection of software.
When you go outside of that, you need to have a specific reason...like going to RPM Fusion to grab things like non-free codecs.
I'm just guessing, but it sounds like you're going to rpmforge and downloading a random RPM, maybe it's not even for your distro, and installing it and then trying to find all the other dependencies and in the end you've got Fedora, CentOS, and SuSE packages all forced installed on the machine and maybe whatever you were trying to do worked. That tends to be what people who bitch about yum/rpm are doing: they're doing stupid things.
RPM/Yum works just fine for 99+% of its millions of users.
