Personally, I don't have a fundamental problem with a distribution (even a popular one) refusing to package something for their systems that they think is awful

Personally, I don't have a fundamental problem with a distribution (even a popular one) refusing to package something for their systems that they think is awful. Sometimes the easy choice is the wrong choice. If you just step back and say "well, they want to eat every meal at a fast food restaurant I guess I better make it easy for them to do that" then you are an enabler. All that said, they should get off the fence about it. If they don't want PHP development beyond the web on Debian they should put that in a policy somewhere and direct people to it.