You can build with rpmbuild without making SRPMS (pass -bb instead of -ba), but in my experience, most CI/CD systems do not provide clean, arbitrarily reproduci

You can build with rpmbuild without making SRPMS (pass -bb instead of -ba), but in my experience, most CI/CD systems do not provide clean, arbitrarily reproducible environments. That said, rpmbuild has grown features over the years to make it more compatible with that model. My experience with RPMs, Debian packages, and various other formats has led me to prefer some of the rigidity and explicitness of rpmspec over the sprawl of automagic that is a debian/ tree, and other similar things. But if you want to do weird things to build packages, nothing stops you from doing that and using a trivial spec file as the intermediate to pass instructions to rpmbuild to wrap it up. The format is not perfect, but I haven't seen anyone make any proposals recently about how to improve it on the rpm-ecosystem mailing list, the rpm-maint mailing list, the rpm project on GitHub, or at any of the developer conferences where rpm developers show up. You seem to have a ton of knowledge and opinions, why not engage with the project?