[palata]

I am not saying that they solve all problems in the world. I am just saying that they have merits.

In your particular example, if you are not happy with your distro, you are free to find another one. Some distros are extremely fast to change.

> upstream devs are bypassing distro maintainers in a lot of cases

IMO, for open source projects, upstream devs should not distribute their library. They should let package maintainers do it for their distro.