I have the same debt-flinch, and the same feeling about how well it works, but with one qualification: I was persuaded to treat mortgage debt differently (though I've always been very conservative about how much I'd take on) and that seems to have served me very well too.

This isn't meant as advice about mortgages: housing markets vary both spatially and temporally. More as a general point: it's probably difficult to make very sophisticated flinch-triggers, which means that even good flinching habits are likely to have exceptions from time to time, and sometimes they might be big ones.