I don't mind that Debian will patch upstream packages to make them fit better with the overall Debian system. If I wanted a no frills system, with minimal inte

I don't mind that Debian will patch upstream packages to make them fit better with the overall Debian system. If I wanted a no frills system, with minimal integration, that strictly followed upstream for everything, then I'd move back to Slackware. Their policy on language specific package management is also pretty reasonable. There's no point duplicating effort packaging things in both Pip and the Debian repos when those package managers work fine under Debian. It lets Python devs use the same tools as every other Python developer on other systems, and avoids Debian specific instructions for package installation. It also completely side steps the problem of following upstream for all of those packages. The advice I've always followed is to always use the language specific package management unless I'm specifically building a package for Debian.