Why should the author report a bug when it's the incompetence of the Debian maintainer?

    1. Its the polite thing to do.
    2. The bug can be tracked and commented on.
    3. The bug is more likely to be fixed.
    4. Thats how most open source projects work.

I've not used Homebrew on the Mac, but it does look like an promising alternative approach. If you don't like something, you can fork the distro, fix the bug and put in a pull request yourself.