Then submit a PR to you local repository maintainers! The rest of us thank you for your service.

They release pretty frequent updates (monthly), with features added in most of them. It honestly doesn't really make sense to package it with the distro. Home Assistant 1 year ago was missing a lot of nice features in the present version. Plus fixes for integrations that stopped working reliably due to API changes (Ecobee comes to mind), etc.

The best/easiest way to run it is to use Docker. They have a script that will set it up for you. After that, the container can basically self update and self manage. Any addons that you want to use are installed as separate docker containers that talk to the main home assistant container. It's super seamless and easy.

In my case, I just setup a barebones Debian VM and ran their setup script. It took care of all the Docker stuff and got it up and running.

It probably deserves its own distribution at this point. HA comprises multiple containers and container management so it would probably be an invasive install to your host OS.