The efforts of both Zed and Debian are based on the same corrupt motive: self-satisfaction
As the upstream developer, Zed wants to make sure that his software is distributed in a manner that is useful to people and actually works and shit. This gives him jollies.
As the distributors, the Debian contributors want to fullfil ideological goals, fit everything into their neat hierarchy, assuage neckbeard sysadmins that the version number is sufficiently ancient (not that the software is, given the distro patches), pretend to care about people running it on the PA-RISC port of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, wank about licensing, and reach consensus. This gives self-important teenagers and manchildren all kinds of joillies.