IME as someone who has done alot of portability work, both for my own projects and others, and including writing more than my fair share of Debian and RPM build

IME as someone who has done alot of portability work, both for my own projects and others, and including writing more than my fair share of Debian and RPM builds (but not as an official package maintainer for a distro), boilerplate stuff is rarely the issue. It's all the random, niche problems that invariably crop up at least once or twice with every project, even smaller ones. Every build is broken somehow. Given that basic reality, what matters is how often you can route around brokenness without patching the upstream build, and when you must patch how easy it will be to implement and maintain those patches.