Basically, I'm not impressed by the promises that come with any app-store-like system because I see a lot of disadvantages for the user and a lot of advantages for the producers of proprietary, user-hostile software.

Package managers have some issues, the biggest one is that the fact that they aren't considered "cool" anymore leads to a lack of volunteers, and that leads to a lack of packages in the repositories (but I have reason to believe that it's not an intrinsic scale problem, and that there is still room to add more manpower, if available, without any reduction in efficiency).

On the other hand, I believe that the advantages of the maintanership model are huge, mostly in the area of being able to trust your computing environment, and thus worth working with it and trying to work with it and improve it instead of substituting it with something else.