Hallo
Typical Wimpy, a full of focused facts. Thank you. 
Two things…
Software.
Well it has to be written by someone. Who? People. All the people on this planet share one common asset - each day is 24 hours long. I write a program, its nice, people are going to want to use it, but packaging for linux - not so easy. Doing it for all the different formats? Well for some programmers that might be just too much. So they do one, and publish the source code for the others to compile if they want to. But, today, and in the future, how many linux desktop users can-do-want to compile programs into working binaries? As linux on the desktop becomes more popular this percentage will continue to decrease. So attracting new young programmers to the linux (FOSS) ecosystem in a way that their work has the maximum potential benefit would definitely be supported by a universal packaging system.
But this is a “big change”, yes - but what are systemd and Wayland/Mir?
The young code writers could code for so many platforms, windoze, OS X, Android, IoT devices, embedded devices, large systems… if we want to continue to be able to attract these people to code for the linux ecosystem we don’t need to keep the old barriers doggedly in place. If you don’t evolve you confine yourself to yesterday, therein lies no future.
Views from other distribution leaders
One recent podcast gave some interesting insights…
(http://ubuntupodcast.org/2016/08/11/s09e24-elementary-penguin/)
The discussion of the snapy packaging system begins at 11 minutes and twelve seconds.
If this meant that I’d never again have to use “alien” to install ProjectLibre (https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/how-to-install-projectlibre-a-professional-grade-project-management-tool-on-ubuntu-mate/4650) I would call that “user friendly”, and that is important.
Once again, a simple thank you to all those who wrote, write and will write code for the GNU/Linux ecosystem. 