That sounds like you could have a situation where the developer wants me to run the app, and I want to run the app, but nobody at the distro I use has packaged up the app, so we're blocked.
But you're "at the distro", and you want to use it, so you package it :) You might want to be nice to others too, so you make that public. Eventually, the community might end up relying on it, and the package gets an official maintainer from the distribution itself.
I've been able to have all the nice things I've wanted, but I also sit down and learn the distributions I use, including how to package stuff, so I can do that myself for things I want to use :)
Some distributions like Arch makes this "self-packaging" extremely easy and simple, and today with LLMs I'm guessing you can get the agent to package most standard software people ship today in under 5 minutes into something acceptable for your own use.
And if you want a system whereby software only gets made available if distro-providers care enough, then that's fine. But you're putting a filter between the software producer and non-technical users, and you should be aware that this is a choice you're making.
If nobody cares enough to make the application available, perhaps it just shouldn't be there.
And yet insane quantities of programs used by millions are only available via raw .deb file downloads, or random alternative PPAs, or via programming language package managers.
The distro maintainer system is impressive, and I’m thankful for it. But saying “it has worked for lots of packages” says nothing about the many it has not worked for.