Seems to me like having the infrastructure in place is only a first step. It's only as valuable as the packages available within the infrastructure. And having

Seems to me like having the infrastructure in place is only a first step. It's only as valuable as the packages available within the infrastructure. And having a useful set of up-to-date packages is a huge amount of continuous (!) work. You need a lot of volunteers for that, or, ideally, the cooperation of the upstream developers. It works very well for Ubuntu (and mostly, I think, plain Debian), as the Debian package archives are very good in the first place, and beyond those there is an ecosystem of volunteer or developer maintained PPAs, and beyond those there are individual .debs released by volunteers or devs that you can plug in, sidestepping the server requirement. It's a cultural difference. It took me quite a while to adapt to it when I switched from Windows to Ubuntu; I was extremely sceptical at first, though now I love it.