> One of the most underrated things about UEFI in my opinion is how it made booting simple. No longer did you need to use special tools (or arcane knowledge) to stick a special real-mode binary in to a normally hidden area of your intended media, now you just drop a few PE binaries in a filesystem your UEFI can read and let it figure itself out.

In theory, yes. In practice, booting Slackware (elilo) from UEFI has been a challenge.