So, to be clear, I also tend to prefer distro-supported packaging. However. Forcing everything to go through the distro means that you massively limit what's available by raising the barriers to entry, you slow pushing new versions (ranging from Arch's "as soon as a packager gets to it" to CentOS's "new major version will be available in 5 years"), and you lock yourself into each distro's packages and make portability a pain (Ubuntu ships libfoo-dev 1.2, Arch ships libfoo-dev 1.3, CentOS has libfoo-devel 0.6, and Debian doesn't package it at all). When distro packages work, they're great, but they do have shortcomings.
> limit what's available by raising the barriers to entry
But that’s what you would have to do youself anyway. You can’t use all fresh upstream version of everything, since they don’t all work together. So some versions you’ll have to hold off on, some other versions might require minor patching. But this is exactly what distro maintainers do.
