[slowpoke]

First off, excellent post. Honestly, I find it quite baffling that people think (or imply) that you need some commercially backed, locked down system to assure software quality. It's simply not true, it's quite the opposite actually. The open alternatives are infinitely superior.

Furthermore, many packet managers (Arch's pacman, for example) offer the ability to rather easily create and install your own packages and manage them with the same system, allowing you to benefit from the advantages of a packet managing system without having to rely only on the curated repositories.