If you have plenty of memory and never get near filling it you may decide swap space would be a waste of disk space.

If you have a laptop and want to use suspend to disk swap space must be at least as large as system memory.

If the programs you are running have rare peaks of memory use then you need enough swap space to stop programs being killed for lack of memory. I have met this situation.

If  you are regulary spilling over to swap then you should fit more memory or get a system with more memory. Otherwise your system will be painfully slow.

Expecting the installer to know which of the above cases it should allow for is asking the impossible. And asking the user will only confuse most users.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_and_hibernate

Insanely too small or insanely too large?  Or just right? - that would be really insane!

I have 16 Gb of RAM and a 27 Gb swap partition.  I thought the advice was to have the swap area at least equal to RAM. I've never seen the swap used (maybe it does when it sleeps); but what the hell, I have six drives in my PC because I've been too lazy to take any out when I've put newer ones in. The swap is on "ancient history" spinning rust 80GB drive that has an old disused Windows XP installation on its other partition AFAIR. This reminds me to check it out for bit-rot some time.

a) Grow up, and realise that this is not Arch, it's a stable, general purpose distribution under no obligation whatsoever to embrace the newest shiny thing or cater to your peculiar tastes.
b) Post your commands and any "bunch of cryotic[sic] errors" encountered, verbatim and without shouting. Assuming you actually want assistance that is.

Actually there is one other option for him, run devuan testing or devuan unstable. The latter sounds really dumb tho

P.S. While registering human verification fails. You asked about current stable version codname. I assumed it was 'Excalibur'. I failed human verification.

Thanks for the bug report.  This should now correctly accept the answer of excalibur.

arrogant and self-centered assumption

OP has 3 topics at this point, all whinging, and all full of the above.
Apparently any configuration choice (so far: root filesystem, partition layout, network configuration tools, boot media, DNS server / protocol, terminal emulator) that doesn't perfectly align with their preferences is some sort of "showstopper" disaster and/or conspiracy.

Is for you to:
a) Grow up, and realise that this is not Arch, it's a stable, general purpose distribution under no obligation whatsoever to embrace the newest shiny thing or cater to your peculiar tastes.
b) Post your commands and any "bunch of cryotic[sic] errors" encountered, verbatim and without shouting. Assuming you actually want assistance that is.

No, this is a bunch of whining and factually incorrect nonsense. Bug reports are submitted with reportbug or by email.

Ventoy has worked for me with Devuan, no problem. (Chimera, Daedelus, & Excalibur)

Ventoy works with ASCII, Beowulf, Chimaera, some older pre-release-builds of Daedalus, but not with the released ISO's, and again with Excalibur (6.0.0, 6.1.0 not yet tested).

Quite an arrogant and self-centered assumption.
Just because you don't use it doesn't mean that everybody else doesn't use it as well.

P.S. While registering human verification fails. You asked about current stable version codname. I assumed it was 'Excalibur'. I failed human verification.

So you are a bot then?

Can you expand on why the installer doesn't work with Ventoy

Specifically, no. I never cared enough to look into it. More generally:
There are about 50 different ways to build a bootable hybrid image, and most of them rely on the initramfs being able to find and loop-mount the image somehow.
That mechanism (and what kind of device and/or filesystem is searched) varies widely from one distro to another. They are looking for their image in their format on their filesystem... Not whatever "USB Maker 3000" decided to do.
Ventoty has a bunch of special-casing hacks to make this work, just not for Devuan.

The image boots fine from a raw device as intended, so this is a Ventoy problem for Ventoy to fix... If anyone actually cares that is.
Multi-boot USB drives are a hack, they've always been a hack, and it's not really on iso builders to pander to them.

Sure, but you'll need better bait to nerd-snipe me on that one. Bootloaders and initramfs scripts are tedious to test at the best of times, and 'need install media (once every 5 years at best)' x 'too lazy to fish out an old  $2 4GiB USB' = 'nanoscopic fleck of motivation'.

I am curious about this. I did a dist-upgrade to Excaliber, as I have done ever since my initial install of ASCII, but I did put the Excaliber iso on a ventoy thumb drive just in case. Can you expand on why the installer doesn't work with Ventoy, or is that best suited for a separate topic?

Was just talking about this on another thread, Ventoy had issues with Daedalus, but it's working again in Excalibur according to rolfie.

I am curious about this. I did a dist-upgrade to Excaliber, as I have done ever since my initial install of ASCII, but I did put the Excaliber iso on a ventoy thumb drive just in case. Can you expand on why the installer doesn't work with Ventoy, or is that best suited for a separate topic?