In my thirty years of driving, most of them in the snowy conditions of the upper midwest, I have gotten into trouble with rear wheel drive cars much more often than fwd cars. As far as the awd system in the wifes edge, I tried playing around with it in a snowy parking lot last winter, and it is very difficult to get any wheel spin no matter how stupid I got.
I understand your concern about loss of directional control with a spinning fwd system, but I think it is much harder for the average driver to recover from a spinning rear wheel induced skid than a spinning fwd straight line slide.