Ubuntu 9.10 hates kernel developers?

Ubuntu has never been the easiest distribution to do kernel development, but it looks like with 9.10 it has made things too painful. I need to build and install kernels all the time, and usually just update grub menu manually. But now with grub 2 in Ubuntu 9.10 they have wrapped the grub menu in grub-mkconfig. Why?

It would be great if the system was setup so just doing 'make install' in the kernel source put in the kernel and updated the grub.cfg, but no that would make too much sense.

P.s: they managed to break the sky2 driver somehow, the connection won't come up and negotiates the wrong speed. It turned out not to be a kernel problem; wiring issue (speed), combined with some Network Manager changes