User now waits for 3rd party "maintainers" to get around to manipulating the software they just want to use from the 1st party developer they have a relationship with. If ever.

I understand this is how distros work. What I'm saying is that the distros are wrong, this is a bad design. It leads to actual bugs and crashes for users. There have been significant security mistakes made by distro maintainers. Distros strip bug fixes and package old versions. It's a mess.

And honestly, a lot of software is not free and won't be packaged by distros. Most software I use on my own machines is not packaged by my distro. ALL the software I use professionally is vendored independently of any distribution. And when I've shipped to various distributions in the past, I go to great lengths to never link anything if possible that could be from the distro, because my users do not know how to fix it.