I would agree that Debian packaging is unnecessarily complicated. The raw stuff is tedious, so various wrappers have been created. In the wild you see a mixture of wrappers and lower level packaging, making everything more complicated for the occasional user.

I started with Debian (not as a packager, but just as a technical user who occasionally wants to do his own stuff). Years later I was forced to use rpm and was suprised that things could be so straight-forward. Yet years later I was forced to look at Arch and was suprised again: Hey, you can understand all of it just in a couple of hours.

Accumulated experience might result in a slightly biased perception. But I still believe the described gradient exists.