Not PP, but the only thing I can figure as an end user is rpm does have a reputation for dependency hell, which is pretty much moot with front ends such as yum,

Not PP, but the only thing I can figure as an end user is rpm does have a reputation for dependency hell, which is pretty much moot with front ends such as yum, dnf and zypper. I can see if I were a package maintainer I might have a different opinion, and get "tired" (more like "fed up", no pun intended) of a format. I only had to make my own packages once or twice when I was a Debian user, Debian packages seemed a chore, and I always resorted to using things like checkinstall and debhelper. With RPM, I don't hesitate to write a spec when I need a package of a piece of software not provided in the repos, and spec files are pretty easy to work with. (I tend to favor using packages over 'make install').