Intrepid Ibex bites the dust

After updating Intrepid (Mac) today, I found it would no longer boot (to anything usable, that is). Just kept going to a black screen after the login page.
If I tried the recovery option, and did the X server fix, I might sometimes go as far as actually seeing the desktop wallpaper, but no icons, no panels, nothing else.
First I tried to reinstall II which went fine and then installed all of 330 uṕdates. This seemed to go fine too, until I rebooted, that is. Now, it exactly the same, just a black screen.
I should mention here that every time I re-installed Intrepid, all of the partitions on my HDD became invisible such that nothing at all appeared on the rEFIt menu page -- just a white screen. Today when this happened, there was no boot flag against ANY partition (I had previously attributed this problem to the presence of the boot flag as when I got rid of the problem wet.)
This time I just rescanned the disk and that brought everything back to visible. I really have no idea what's going on here but luckily it's easy to resolve.
What was good about Intrepid in the few days I was using it?
1. Booted a bit faster (actually maybe 30-40 seconds faster than Foresight on the Dell). This, of course, only applies when it does actually boot to completion which was not often.
2. The recovery mode boot option includes options like "fix X server" which is a useful addition
I honestly didn't see anything else that really excited me

What was bad about II?
1. The shutdown button on the panel only allowed logout.
2. Prepending preferred DNS servers in /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf didn't work. I was forced to put what I wanted in /etc/resolv.conf and make that file immutable.

Maybe I'll try it again when it gets to beta.