My take on this (obviously not the consensus) is that the maemo os development community is too transient to force into a traditional debian/ubuntu maintainer structure. A large portion of Maemo software is pretty much homebrew and ports. Forcing Maemo.org actually damages the homebrew aspect of it... mostly since its a broken website (akamai + midguard cms apparently do not mix). Perhaps ITT software could better enable this homebrew aspect.
Additionally (and probably unpopularly) i think relying -solely- on repos hurts tablets. I think whenever possible, tablet developers should make some attempt to release a version which statically links any necessary libraries so that there is no dependency hell. This is done for desktop users with thumbdrives such as those here http://portableapps.com/
I vote that Reggie starts up his own repo, and provide a simple and logical means to publish to it, instead of the beaurocracy that is submitting to maemo extras. (Honestly do we really need a sign our packages for a tablet which ships with 256meg filesystem?) One reggie repo would be better than 10 or so independent repos, would it not? Of course that implies alot of potential bandwidth which may not be wanted.