Actually, the packaging format and tooling is only a very small part of the time spent by the people contributing to the distribution. Go read debian-devel - on

Actually, the packaging format and tooling is only a very small part of the time spent by the people contributing to the distribution. Go read debian-devel - only a very few people are involved in those things. As far as I can tell, almost all the time is spent polishing and integrating packages and fixing temporary regressions, that sort of thing. RedHat and Debian have different standards for various aspects of the package contents, so you can't just use a package from one and expect it to work on the other, even if the package format and install tool was the same.