Nappy snow

When Ari was a few months old, I was alarmed to discover weird crystals in his Huggies nappy one day.
A quick check of Baby Love told me these were entirely normal - they were in fact bits of the stuff they put in nappies to make them absorbent and were totally harmless.
But are they?
Recently, every single time I changed Ari's nappy, his little bum was covered in this nappy snow and it seemed to be giving him nappy rash (but then again, it could have been his teeth doing that).
I jumped on my favourite baby website, Essential Baby, and discovered that this had happened to heaps of other mums. And it seemed they were all using Huggies crawler nappies.
Was it a bad batch, I wondered? Should I stop using Huggies nappies?
I called Huggies and they told me this was entirely normal, the nappy snow was harmless, but thanks for bringing it to their attention, and here's a bag of nappies for your trouble.
But I decided I'd try another brand of nappy anyway, just to see if there was any difference.
After reading many favourable reviews, I settled on Safeway's new home brand nappy. No Nappy Snow to speak of, but they felt stiffer, more cardboardy, and didn't seem to hug Ari's bum as well. Maybe I'd bought them too big, who knows?
But all this got me thinking about nappies and how we choose which ones to use.
They are expensive little buggers, so you have to feel like you're getting your money's worth. I've been told Aldi's brand of nappy is very good.
Let the debate begin!