GRUB not ready for public use

Most GNU+Linux OSs now come with only GRUB available as part of the setup. So after the last incident with Ubuntu breaking my laptop MBR, I decided to approach it differently. I found a USB stick which I could use as my "boot" drive, I created the ext3 /boot partition on it, and installed GRUB onto hd3 as part of the install (which I am guessing correlates with /dev/sdc, although that was not explained anywhere in Ubuntu).

So when I rebooted and expected it to work.. the GRUB screen appeared, with my menu choices. However.. none of them worked, not even my "Microsoft Windows" one, which should have surely just been hooked into the MBR or Bootsector of my C drive (sda/hd0)!? The Kubuntu menu items just said kernel not found.

What is really odd is that GRUB is so anti-user-friendliness. It says "Error 17" whatever that means, could they really not have included a few words to explain the problem? I typed "help" and was presented with some commands, but no interactive help, I don't know what order to specify root/boot/chainload?? etc, and I could not even view the available discs/partitions that were available!

GRUB is sorely missing a simple menu which lets users select drive (MBR) or a partition (Bootsector) from which to load. I have to say I am disappointed it is so poor currently.

After formatting as FAT32 my /dev/sdc2 partition, my USB stick no longer even has a working GRUB menu, so I'm presuming it wasn't storing its data on the /boot partition afterall..!?

Looked at "grub-floppy", it is just a warning saying it doesn't work and maintainers need to fix it. So that option is not available either now.