It's a tradeoff.
As an upstream developer, I find it endlessly annoying that distributions ship broken calibre packages, and I then have to deal with the bug reports. Because of this, linux users generate a volume of bug reports quite out of proportion to their fraction of the calibre user base, despite the fact that I develop calibre on linux, so it should be the best supported platform. Fortunately, I now have an automated stock response for bug reports from linux users that tells them to first switch to using the official package
However, as a user I appreciate the fact that someone else is taking the system maintenance load off my shoulders. For packages that I consider critical in some way, I maintain my own builds, not relying on the distro builds, but for the vast majority of packages, I'm perfectly happy to let some one else do the maintenance/integration work.