[jelmer]

The process is indeed complex, but there are efforts to standardize on a single simple way to do packaging. Unfortunately with an archive of 30k source packages, that is a slow process.

A great resource is https://trends.debian.net/, which tracks some of the different ways of doing packaging, as well as the progress on convergence.

With the new style debhelper that we're converging on and a straightforward package, creating a new package should not have to involve a lot of typing - although it's still split across multiple files.