It's not just for devs, but loads of people just want their Wordpress/Drupal/MediaWiki/Gallery/phpBB/Joomla website to work, or they want to sell shared hosting

It's not just for devs, but loads of people just want their Wordpress/Drupal/MediaWiki/Gallery/phpBB/Joomla website to work, or they want to sell shared hosting to customers who want that. The fact that Debian has a "task" for LAMP is really a reflection of how simple the architecture is: you can press a button to install LAMP and then you can install any one of the applications I mentioned on top of it. LAMP is not a "default" by any means, it's just something easy to stick in the package manager, something that a lot of people use. Sure, you can also press a button to install Rails or Django, but those are more self-contained and don't need to be packaged separately as tasks. The reason LAMP is mentioned as important is because a lot of people do use it and do depend on it. In an ideal world, every application would work on Debian. But with finite resources, you make a list of the things you want to test the most.