Personally, I've been using grub2 for a long time now. A year or two, probably. Even Debian has it available -- and that's my measuring stick as to whether things are "old" or not.

I disagree with your statement about city water. Lots of people living in rural areas have wells and septic system. But when my old telecom provider replaced the party lines in 1998, they ran fibre instead of copper, and so now people have "cheap", reliable internet, but live 10 kilometres from the nearest water pipe. It might not even be as good as my Teksavvy DSL now that I've moved to a larger place, but it is definitely possible to have.