David wrote:
Said more simply? This discussion is on the wrong list. You're talking to the wrong people. Actually it looks more like you are talking to yourselves.
Not quite: Setting up a distro and preparing packages to include them into a distro is a bit more than blindly following "upstreams".
It also means package maintainers to be "listening" to their "user-base", to communicate their user-base's concerns upstream and to deviate from upstream when necessary.