> No one looks at Debian and is saying "well maybe we should do what they do"...

Arch does exactly what Debian for the official repos. It was only the AUR that was compromised. Possibly the issue is that Arch is a bit to strict for the official repos which has forced too many people on to the AUR ones.

Ubuntu has personal PPAs that are easy to setup - but Ubuntu has a good system to get everything into mainline (mostly because Debian has nearly everything and they ship Debian) and so they are rarely used. Arch has vastly less official packages and so there are a lot of niches where you have to use a AUR.

I don't think the issue is Arch is to strict though. I think the issue is Arch isn't good at helping people getting things that should be official to official. Publishing a AUR is easy, getting something from an AUR to official is hard and most people give up - often without trying.