Forms Based Authentication in MOSS and WSS v3

I've been looking for good documentation on FBA, and short of writing it myself, I came across these on the MS Sharepoint Team's blog.

Forms based auth has been one of those features I've had difficulty getting to work smoothly, especially in a hosted environment.  Harder still is making it work with an Active Directory membership provider instead of a database.  Why would you want to do this anyway?  It looks prettier.

A side note also, one of the things I noticed about the above documentation : While very thorough it tells you how rather than why to take certain paths.  For instance a web application is extended rather than using the default zone – why?  Setting the default zone to FBA would mean search would be unable to connect and through a plethora of fairly vague messages in the event logs.  Etc.