You're missing the point, which isn't that "badly-maintained software" and "technical debt" are the problems. It's that I, as a developer who writes Python which runs on Fedora, EL[6|7], Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch have to go through an inordinate amount of testing and hoop-jumping in order to make sure that my application runs on EL6 and Fedora, to say nothing of systems which aren't guaranteed to have the same package names, library locations, or major versions of Python, much less having it at all (especially a problem on EL6 and Gentoo).
It makes sense for me, as a developer, not to go through repackaging and retesting for 7 distros with 4 different packaging paradigms and 3 init systems when I could simply tell you to run a container. None.
Disk space and memory are now cheap. Statically linked binaries are coming back. Containers as the new /opt strike a middle ground between distro portability and developer effort. It must be nice for you to live in an ivory tower.