Sure, there's no reason not to standardize the information you give to the people who package your code for a given platform. But package.el makes it easier for

Sure, there's no reason not to standardize the information you give to the people who package your code for a given platform. But package.el makes it easier for users to smuggle code onto the filesystem whose version and dependencies aren't announced to the package manager and which may have never even been tested on the platform, and I regard that as a bad idea. Our sysadmins certainly don't want to go back to the world where every app had its own way of handling plugins and they had to understand all of them.