who should do packaging for each distro? - upstream maintainer: too much work. each distro requires certain best practices/convention. - distro: may not meet certain standard set by upstream maintainer.
As a long time Linux user and someone who tried to get in some software into Few Linux Distro Repositories, it's high time we start recommending the above model.
Not my words, but at this point I'll even take just a zip file with apps that always just works over having to deal with all the headaches from distro package managers for user level software.