To be honest, you still do need to grok the difference between native and quilt packages, and, in case of the latter, know that you need to put your patches into `debian/patches/` instead of directly modifying the source tree. And if you started by cloning the packaging from a git repo, you may need to know what pristine-tar is as well.

A well-written tutorial will explain that to you quickly, but there's definitely more friction than with PKGBUILD files where you can pretty much just look at the contents of the file and edit it directly without second thoughts.