Don’t assume people are disagreeing with you. I think we are working toward the same point. Diesel is one of the main bases for SHTF prepping. Most scenarios are days and weeks not months and years. Gasoline is an hourly resource. When we had an ice storm here, the gas stations ran out of fuel in one day. All of them. Most, the same day. And, smart people with generators had 5 gallons of gas on hand which lasted through the first night. A 32 gallon drum of fuel oil in the back of the garage would have solved a lot of problems.
My apologies if I misunderstood.
The first problem we had was the gas stations couldn’t get it out of the underground tanks because there was no electricity; then they could pump it and quickly ran out. We were fortunate because the storm hit in late October when it wasn’t yet too cold in northeastern NJ; within a couple of weeks the temperatures dipped and while most of us had power restored already several low-lying areas (not just the shore points, but also places like Hoboken) were still without electricity. I camped a lot in my younger years, so I had good sleeping bags for the whole family if we had to deal with colder temperatures (though if they fell too much, I’m not sure how freezing pipes could be avoided).
At the time I read about several different generators that used diesel; we still have many homes in the area using home heating oil (and the tanks are hundreds of gallons - from 250 to 500+), and those generators would certainly seem a better option. As I mentioned initially, it was a good dry run for the area; we learned what worked and what didn’t, and what we needed to keep on hand. I saw it as an opportunity to use up old military MREs (we had plenty of food, but since we didn’t know when everything would return to normal I saw no point in going through it first). While we had no electricity, we at least still had our natural gas (so stoves worked for cooking).
I found the most useless items to be radios (battery-operated and hand-cranked) simply because there was no news to report, and cellphones (since the towers were without power; it was difficult to get a signal). The authorities themselves seemed to be playing it by ear, and I really learned nothing from listening.