This is a nice idea, but how do you follow through in practice? Who decides what counts as an "upstream dependency", where do you draw the line? Is the Linux kernel included? Are desktop environments included? How do you decide how much of the pot goes to each project, does curl get an equal amount to Wine? Why/why not?
As I said, it's a nice idea but I have a feeling the complexity behind making this work well is what might have kept them from doing it.