Having to use these automatic packaging tools is exactly my gripe. I don’t want to have to rely on whatever scripts someone conjured up if it’s not supported by the distro itself.
I agree it always makes sense to have sources involved for packages that are getting distributed as part of the distro, but what if I want to just deploy my product on a server without the sources?
The tools I am talking about are integrated into, supported by, and used by packages within, the distro itself. I'm not talking about external things that make low quality packages.
If you want to make external packages (such as those that don't come with source), then you can just use `dpkg-deb --build` or one of its many wrappers to shove the binary into a .deb.
There is a large range of documentation, everything from the simple to the more advanced to different packaging niches. The large amount of docs makes that harder to navigate though, and a lot of stuff is moving towards automated packaging these days anyway.
https://wiki.debian.org/AutomaticPackagingTools