Easily arguable that RPi isn't made with such use cases in mind. I'm all in favor of removing unnecessary bloat if only a small percentage of user base is ever going use it, especially when the software is readily available.

>If those repos are inaccessable for any reason, I have a bunch of hardware that's very hard to do anything useful with.

How so? They are just Linux boxes, you can just download the source code and compile the binaries you need. Pre-built packages are not necessary for functional OS.