But, at least on Diablo, some of the bootscripts didn't work without busybox. And even on Fremantle you are limited to really old versions of Debian tooling (think Sarge/Etch), with no debconf nor any other stuff. Seriously, if you want to try to "make Maemo more Debian" you're going to have to fight much greater issues than optification (which is relatively so simple it can even be done automatically!).

This still doesn't mean optification needs to be keep as is, though, since the rootfs free space is getting lower with every firmware update, and thus the "forest of symlinks" "hard limit" is getting tighter every day (which is why I didn't add it as solution, and instead voted for #2).