I suspect that most people with debt can explain/mitigate the concerns but they get denied, initially either because they do not do a good enough job explaining it on their SF86 or the SF86 just doesn’t give you the chance.
At lot of this could be addressed with the investigator and that’s what I tried to do. I provided a pile of documentation to the investigator and the same information in the reply to my SOR. I was denied but the same information, pretty much, allowed me to prevail on appeal.
I feel like the adjudicators need better instruction on interpreting mitigating factors.