Switched ground is a good thing.

Shorts are most likely to be to ground. A switched ground wire that gets shorted to ground will just turn something on (and likely continue to work), whereas a switched hot one would have blown a fuse (hopefully) and not be working at all. In Brian's case, he might have had a dead truck instead of a poorly running one.

Similarly, this is also the reason the FSM tells you to remove the *negative* battery terminal when working on your vehicle. That way when you drop a wrench onto the battery and its also touching the body or engine, the worst that would happen is you just hooked the battery back up, not shorted anything out. Positive to body does nothing, negative to body is normal operation (obviously you're SOL no matter what if you lay something directly across both terminals).
If you leave the negative hooked up, anything touching the positive terminal to the body or engine is a dead short across the battery and big sparks will fly.

Just because a switched ground confuses some people doesn't mean its a bad design. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> Its actually quite common in other non-domestic vehicles and electronics.