Why would "building from source" be a difficult way to create a package? ISTM that if you have any software at all, it's already building from source? I understand that building from source is considered difficult for users, but here you seem to be talking about maintainers. Or do you mean setting up $#%&ing autotools? In that case I agree.
the dependency hell from building from source is slightly less of a purgatory than that coming from anything above it. That includes the headaches of autotools.
I dunno, Gobolinux is pretty much LFS with addition layer of tools. And more often than not, the problem is that of developers doing a crap job of actually documenting their dependencies (or hardcoding paths and/or filenames).
