> Personally, the amount of times that this "packaging and updating infrastructure" has broken working applications or whole Linux installations leads me to believe that no amount of testing will ever make it work reliably.

What distributions have you been using? I rarely have a problem with Debian or Fedora in this manner.

> It doesn't stop at PPA, to really support all the other picky Linux guys with their distributions I need to provide dozens of packages built against the dependencies of whichever versions of those distributions are currently in use.

Get your package into Debian and Fedora, other distros might pick it up. If your software is popular enough, someone might volunteer to do the packaging for you. If it's something I care about and not available, I'll compile it (if it's a compiled language). If it's something I care about and it needs to go into production, I'd build and maintain my own rpms or debs internally.