I have heard only bad things when I ask how a deb is made
Debs are not really that 'hard' to make the
documentation is intimidating but the process itself is not really all to bad. Arch Linux with its
PKGBUILD system is really easy and the documentation is so short you will wonder where the rest of it is.
Currently package systems are a hot topic with several cross platform formats being talked about. There is
Flatpak and
Snap that allow for simple install of applications in a cross distro way by providing a common base system their packages are built from. Now to me that seams kinda silly since its creating a shadow system on your system. For example the flatpak of my current project needs several other flatpaks as dependencies. It ends up needing alot more space then just my application because it also needs to have bundles for all the run times it needs and such. If this is sounding similar to the current package system on your current linux that would be because it is. The main difference is that the flatpak come from flathub (or another flatpak "repo") not your distros servers. Snap is similar to flatpak. Then there is
Appimage; Appimages are a self contained format that is akin to the mac os "App Bundle" where all of an applications dependencies are contained with in the appimage. Chances are that at some point in the future that unmaintained application deployed as a flatpak, snap or appimage will continue to work long after the libraries its using have been changed.