These cases should be addressed before just giving up. We have lots of helpful people involved with Extras (one of whom is paid fulltime to help people to get their packages into Extras), if you have an issue, talk to one of them, then once it's decided that the issue can't be addressed (there's not many of these, really, even the Fennec problem is being addressed in its own way) you can move on to your own solution.

That's why we want to get everything we can into Extras (with source packages for free stuff), so we don't run into a situation where a disappeared-maintainer brings down half of the bailing-wire-and-chewing-gum system. Extras wont randomly disappear, like 3rd party repositories, and having the source packages on hand gives us a hand up in future package maintenance when a maintainer does disappear.

This is why we have a support structure for Extras. If you have issues, ping the mailing list, ping #maemo, ping bugs.maemo.org, or ping one of the half-dozen knowledgeable people involved to help you.

Going it alone doesn't help the problem to get fixed and it doesn't help your users.

That's the problem, a large portion of users don't really see it as an issue because they don't understand that it's an issue—that is, until adding some random repository drops their device into a reboot loop.