Agreed. Regular melpa is practically a parody of a package repo - sometimes it seems it took the worst option at every possible decision. Building directly from HEAD, using insane version numbering that causes package.el to prioritize it over every other repo (someone more cynical than I might think this was intentional), and yet somehow managing to be by far the most popular way to distribute packages, even more so than melpa-stable (which is actually quite tolerable).