The scaffolding I'm referring to is the "debian" directory containing rules, controls etc.. The built-in Debian packaging tools are already wrappers on top of

The scaffolding I'm referring to is the "debian" directory containing rules, controls etc.. The built-in Debian packaging tools are already wrappers on top of wrappers on top of wrappers, adding another layer on top of that (with Cmake or whatever) only adds to the confusion and goes to show how over-complicated it is. For example, the article you linked uses dpkg-deb --build while I've seen alternatives use dpkg-buildpackage and debuild. The 5 different documented ways was specifically referring to Python packages. There are also helpers like dh_systemd which I could never get to work so just ran systemctl commands in postinst and such.