Are you sure you’re a Doper? I regularly invest large quantities of time in “pointless” exercises (that I refuse to call pointless), because I may learn something, or because there is an inherent challenge to be met.
I might be wrong, but I vaguely remember trying to dual-boot windows xp & linux and reading that it was better to go the other way around; installing windows first at the beginning of the disk, then linux was better able to install around an existing windows install than vice-versa (and could overwrite the boot manager with its own stuff). Not sure if with win7 etc things may be different though.
The pointlessness is sometimes part of the attraction, for me.