you make enough but.....

can someone PLEASE explain to me how we can make more than enough and qualify for less than 4.5% apr on a home loan but our credit score is not high enough for a lender to feel "comfortable" lending us money?!?!
i can..........it's because of our lifestyle!  i can hear y'all now "well you must be HORRIBLE people and never pay your bills on time!"  actually, CrazyDaddy and i have paid cash for almost everything in hour house.  after watching our parents and grandparents struggle with credit debit when we were growing up made us vow (when we first started out) to only buy what we could afford.  the old adage of "only buy what you can afford" was drilled into us when we were kids very well.  apparently it should have the footnote *unless you want to ever buy a house and then you need to live in debt to prove you can afford it* SERIOUSLY!!!  to say our mouths dropped yesterday when the loan officer said "you make more than enough money to qualify and you'd only be charged 4.3% apr BUT since you don't really have any credit we can't lend to you" would be an understatement.  even HE sounded amazed by this turn of events! 
in case you haven't gathered by now we were denied a VA home loan because, basically, we don't have enough debt.  i swear, i keep having more and more doubts that our country is the greatest country on earth.  how much sense is it to penalize those of us who have lived within our means, paid our bills on time and not fed into the credit monster?  i still do not want to feed into the never ending cycle of living on credit but what else can we do?  eventually CrazyDaddy will leave the navy and we will not have a choice but to either rent or live in our car.  so unless we give in and let the monster bite our hands off we will be repeating this.  if this doesn't prove the rich get richer and the poor are damned to get poorer i don't know what would.  i mean the lender isn't even looking at the FICO score......the magical number we have all been told to keep an eye on if you wanted to be a home owner but NOPE they (the lender) actually look at whatever your middle of the road score is......ours was 40 points lower than our FICO!!  oh, did i say ours, i meant to say CrazyDaddy's because according to the credit bureaus i don't even exist!!!!!
we've seen people who have repossessions, bankruptcies or robbing peter to pay paul every day to survive be able to buy homes!  apparently us having little to no credit because we've been living within our means makes us bad candidates for homeownership!  are you fucking kidding me!!!  i'm completely embarrassed that this is the way our society works. i constantly teach my children that you only need what you can afford and if you don't have the money for it you don't need it but rather want it.  no wonder people have a confusion when it comes to need vs. want.  i mean, you NEED a hose but the banks WANT you to spread yourself so finically thin to prove you deserve it.  this is bunk!!!  this is what is wrong with our society!  the banks and government want to ensure that every last tom, dick and harry are in debt up to their eyeballs!  they don't feel comfortable lending to a family who have worked damned hard for everything they have in life and made sure not to owe more than they can afford but lenders have no qualms giving to those who have over extended themselves!!  *eye roll* 
now we have to work with a loan counselor to help us raise our credit score in order to buy a home.  i am trying to remind myself that if we are careful we won't end up circling the drain once we start really using the credit cards.  our kids deserve some sort of normalcy right?  in order to secure that we want to buy a home.  in the long run homeownership will secure not only our financial future (right) but also our children's..............right...........RIGHT!!!  now it looks like the next few months we will be living on borrowed money (credit cards) to prove that we can pay back debts owed.  i guess paying our bills and buying everything with cash isn't the american way.  it's projected that by march or so we will have lived on credit long enough to prove we will pay them back.
i knew this would be a crazy ride but never in my life did i expect this to happen!