Ah, well the suitibility of a shelter depends on the environment. For Boacrow you'll note he is in a warm wet temperate area (Alabama). He may need to stay dry with out needing the extra warmth of a debris hut. I imagine a debris hut in Alabama would be just as stifling in a summer thunderstorm as the tent which served him so poorly. Speaking from my own experiance in Texas, I doubt I'd have been able to sleep in either a tent or a debris hut. A shelter which keeps you mostly dry with out suffocating you is the order of the day. Now, up here in Wyoming, depending on the time of year, I'd probably go with a debris hut. That is if I was spending multiple nights and wasn't already wet and cold. Wet and cold, spending what I hope to be a single unplanned night, I'd build the lean-to and fire screen most rickety-tik, build a big fire and open my coat to it and keep it burning through the night. Soak up the warmth and dry myself out. Hopefully, I've left a flight plan so someone knows where I'm going, and either they or Smoky the Bear will notice my fire and come running.

As they tell us in ROTC, METT-TC: Mission, equipment, troops, time terrain and civilians. Each situation is different. I can't say which shelter I'd choose to build until I get there. It's easy to pick the one you like and say "this is the be all and end all of survival shelters", but it doesn't hold up under real world conditions. And we don't get to set the initial conditions. That's the one of the few erks I have with this site, the few times people have tried to do "What if..." games everyone tries to rearrange the initial conditions because "they would never get caught that way" instead of going with the problem and excercising their problem solving skills. Don't try to make the problem fit your solution, make a solution that fits the problem.