Is there an easy way to force YUM to reinstall a set of packages?

[David Hagood]

I updated the night before last to testing, and it ate my system: the
Gnome menu has no icons, key repeat is disabled, auto-mounting of
removable media doesn't work, and many other broken features.

I'd *like* to tell YUM to try to reinstall all the Gnome packages to see
if it wedged on something, but YUM doesn't seem to have the idea of
"reinstall" like APT does.

Short of getting a list of packages, removing them from the RPM database
with "rpm --erase --justdb", then forcing YUM to install them, does
anybody else have a good suggestion as to how to fix this?

Somewhat off topic: WHY the frotz was YUM chosen over APT for RPM as
*the* way to update Fedora? APT has a much more mature feature set, and
by using it you can leverage a degree of commonality with Debian based
distros.

And please don't say "You can use APT if you want to" - the repos don't
support APT, they don't have the APT metadata, and so "using" APT would
be like "using" an old rotary dial phone on the cellular network.