I also do not like Vyatta's weirdness. It looks like Linux, acts like Linux, but then you have to use all of the awful Vyatta commands to actually do anything.
If you are expecting a Linux distribution then yeah, it is weird. If you are expecting a network appliance then it's par for the course and you are grateful that you can drop to shell to do other things. JunOS is pretty much the same way.
It's not awful - just different. They specifically did it that way because people who configure large networks are much more used to this kind of interface (a la Cisco and Juniper hardware) and like this way a lot better.
I'm hoping to really work on improving the documentation in the new Vyatta fork, VyOS, because poor documentation really let Vyatta down.
