> Maybe it’s just me being unwilling to dive into all the details, but seriously, why are there like 30 packages starting with 'grub' under Debian? All I want is to boot my kernel under EFI, and the package choices are overwhelming.

Debian packaging policy is insane, that's nothing to do with grub. On a regular distribution there is one (1) grub package (e.g. I just checked Slackware and Gentoo).