There are a few other freebee's out there worth checking out. And a number of really good ones much cheaper than whm/cpanel too. Whm/cpanel is fairly decent but they do want a pretty hefty monthly fee.

Some of these are very stable, use less resources, and are much faster than whm/cpanel. Guess it depends on your setup and needs, but nothing wrong with checking out the competition or the freebee's. Cpanel is nice, but it's not perfect either and it's not cheap. Some alternatives are a fraction see more of the price or as you mention FREE!

And if you are a super know it all there is no need that you would ever need a control panel of any kind. If you are a super smart ass you should know every linux command line in a matter of seconds, which is way faster anyway than clicking on some links in whm.

You should be able to secure, harden, change ports, install firewall, anti-ddos, optimize apache and mysql, change your your root login to something other than root and less than standard port 22. Way to much that could be done, that takes a little time and most people don't take the time to do it. These are only a few examples of many many more.