I strongly agree that the reporting and visibility you're talking about are important. But there's one other advantage of the shared library thing, which is th

I strongly agree that the reporting and visibility you're talking about are important. But there's one other advantage of the shared library thing, which is that when you need to react fast (to a critical security vulnerability, for example), it is possible to do it without coordinating with N number of project/package maintainers and getting them all to rebuild. You still do want to coordinate (at least for testing purposes), but maybe in emergencies it's more important to get a fix in place ASAP.