I think the story of "forking" system packages for local use needs improvement.
And for all Debian's adherence to standards, it's unfortunate that one couldn't be agreed upon for source packages, 'apt-get source' is a mixed bag.
This makes it a royal pain to maintain forks, because now you have to be up on three or four source packaging formats, in addition to getting the final binary format to comply with the standards.
For the parts of the system where you don't care, using the distributor provided packages is fine.
But when you do care, it is often simpler to just use pristine upstream rolled into your own deb as a starting point for managing package versions at your site.
It's like the mainstream news media — anytime they report on a subject you know anything about, it's riddled with obvious errors. After this happens enough times, you know enough not to trust them about other subjects…
And for all Debian's adherence to standards, it's unfortunate that one couldn't be agreed upon for source packages, 'apt-get source' is a mixed bag.
This makes it a royal pain to maintain forks, because now you have to be up on three or four source packaging formats, in addition to getting the final binary format to comply with the standards.
For the parts of the system where you don't care, using the distributor provided packages is fine.
But when you do care, it is often simpler to just use pristine upstream rolled into your own deb as a starting point for managing package versions at your site.