The author of i3 Windows Manager has a series of interesting blog posts about his pain points with Debian project. [1] Well worth reading the blog series.
He also has a research distribution named 'distri' that tries to fix certain aspects of those pain points. [2]
This is really an excellent post. While I'm not a debian developer, some of those challenges enumerated affect end users directly as well. Like plenty of packages being single-maintainer fiefdoms, with wildly different quality of maintenance.
I thought they were both excellent, thoughtful posts. Not being an i3 user, I wasn’t previously aware of Michael Stapelberg but I like the way he’s willing to work on solutions that he has identified, e.g., he offered to create proper archives for the Debian mailing lists.
His proposal for speeding up package management also seems like a useful project. If only he had the same political clout as other prominent FOSS developers.
He also has a research distribution named 'distri' that tries to fix certain aspects of those pain points. [2]
[1] https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-windin...
[2] https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-08-17-introducing-d...