I believe this is in the arhives (over and over and over).
It comes down to personal views, as far as I can see.

It's a bit sloppy; it's a fairly standard, cross platform
way to abstract authentication.

Since we're all peeing on each others' OS choices, and make
folks write different tools for each different platform,
Microsoft makes it all moot by coming up with a single way
(that's violently proprietary) that is attractive to managers
and to users.

Me?  I want to slide a smart card into my (Solaris|BSD|Linux|
or Windows box) get a popup for a passphrase and log in everywhere.
PAM looks to be the best bet for the Unix side in that it (even with
slight variations) run on all these platforms.

Quoting Stephane Bortzmeyer (bortzmeyer@nic.fr):
> On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 12:35:58PM +0100,
>  Wojciech Puchar <wojtek@tensor.3miasto.net> wrote 
>  a message of 13 lines which said:
> 
> > i wish PAM won't ever be integrated in NetBSD, or if it will, it will be
> > completely optional.
> 
> Why?