Maybe you guys have several systems and are prepared to wipe
one but what if you only have one Mint install ?
What do you have so incredible precious and un-backupable / not-again-installable on your Mint install? As far as I'm concerned, every new FreeMiNT reinstall is matter of copying xaaes.cnf, mint.cnf, /root (but this is not a case anymore, it's on separate partition yet) and some bits from /etc. Everything else, like my experimental stuff, is in /usr/local (separate partition as well) so no loss of data here.
To sum this up, it's anything but hard to even completely wipe out mint + its unix stuff at all.