No, they made the right choices.
(1)Make it work.
(2)Make it correct.
(3)Make it fast.
Can take a long time to get to step 3 with something as safety critical as an update tool.
Can take a long time to get to step 3 with something as safety critical as an update tool.
To their credit, they started really early. And burning it all down seems to be an increasingly better option for purely extrinsic reasons; the late mover advantage keeps increasing, and better and better options keep emerging. A LMDB-based refactor perhaps? This is probably a pipe dream, alas: Debian developers must have a hundred different programs that all build and extend forward the original "make it work" technology, to make it survivable. And that's really my final counter to your cute linear notion of ongoing improvement: the mold is set, and there are dozens of things bound up in what has happened.
RPM systems have the advantage IIRC that they can basically just download a bunch of sqlite3 databases, which means they do not have to parse any data.