In my experience Debian has always had it's share of community drama and static. Around 2002 I used to publish a couple of RPMs and since I used to use Debian myself for some of my own servers I decided to publish .debs as well. So some debian folks asked me to "make them official". I found becoming a Debian dev such a pita I just abandoned the attempt. Literally at one point one Debian dev who was a co-worker of mine in real life refused to sign my key because he said "how could he really sure of my identity". Dude, we work together, for a regulated financial institution that does background checks. How could I get away with having some kind of secret identity?

I just decided to avoid the friction and not bother publishing my .debs.