As a user, I'm afraid that you don't seem to be a representative of typical users. I would be happy to use a traditional distribution if they don't break on updates, which is still not the case. It's clear that traditional distros were not satisfactory on even keeping their own promises. I know they work hard, but ultimately the visible outcome says everything.
This only works if "core" refuses to use Rust, so it's not sustainable. We already can't build Firefox and GNOME without Rust. Maybe Apache and curl next. And then?
Clearly you missed the disclaimer of warranty in the licensing terms.
Packagers are welcome to maintain their own patches, or their own fork, if they like. But they don't have any right to tell upstream what to do or demand particular guarantees from upstream.
I disagree. This is how you get the Google Play store or the "freeware" app marketplace. It sucks. As a user, I'm quite happy to continue using a traditional distribution even if it means I don't get to use a handful of flashy programs by developers that disagree with the concept of maintainers. So far that choice has been much more positive than negative for me, and I'm doing my best (by promoting the open source ecosystem) to keep it that way.
> Maintainers don't have a right
If you're creating open source software, they quite literally do! https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html
If you put in a bunch of crap that doesn't belong in an application (ads, for example), I'm glad I have a maintainer that can either strip this out thanks to the GPL (or BSD / MIT etc), or else choose not to include your app in the distribution at all.