Splitting a package into docs, libs and executables makes a lot of sense. Splitting those further, so you've got umpteen "independent" packages which 95% of us

Splitting a package into docs, libs and executables makes a lot of sense. Splitting those further, so you've got umpteen "independent" packages which 95% of users are just going to have to manually recombine to get the functionality the upstream package provides out of the box, can get pathological. Debian has historically been particularly bad at this, and Ubuntu inherited that tendency.