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.
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?