If you're not familiar with YaST, it's OpenSUSE's control panel for system administration tasks. Managing software and repositories, partitioning, fstab and automounting, hardware, partitions, bootloader, virtual machines, etc. It is available as a graphical program (Qt and I believe there is a GTK port), ncurses, and as a limited web client.
I understand why many users would not want to make use of such a tool or why it does not fit in with certain distros like Arch. However, YaST is merely an optional convenience, and for something like Ubuntu or Fedora, why isn't there a control panel like this? I can set up automount for an external drive in YaST by