> I can't say that's been my experience, once I figured out [dozens of moving parts]

That's the whole point. Nobody doubts that the Debian tooling works (it evidently does), but the learning curve to get to that point is massively steeper and longer.

Makepkg you can figure out in an hour, at most an afternoon for the finer details like custom patches; reliable Debian packaging takes days or weeks to understand set up.