That's a valid complaint (I too wish it were simpler) but am not sure how feasible that is given the myriad of ways upstream packages are managed and the varyin

That's a valid complaint (I too wish it were simpler) but am not sure how feasible that is given the myriad of ways upstream packages are managed and the varying degrees to which they do or don't support distros in general, let alone a specific one like Debian. I think that's part of the reason Debian has become such a popular upstream distro: it converts an incoming Tower of Babel collection of source repos into a reasonably coherent and standardized set of packages.