> the way distros inject themselves into this software development process produces these bad outcomes

As a former maintainer of packages in an enterprise Linux ecosystem, I agree. But...the patches are often meant to solve a dependency mismatch and the maintainers can't easily pull related dependencies forward without breaking other applications. It's great that other distros like Arch just simply upstream the patches - it's the right thing to do after all - but that takes time that the enterprise distributions don't always have.