I don't doubt it's convenient. But we did a lot of local changes over the years, and a binary blob gets in the way. I remember hacking an ODBC backend because it didn't like something about our HP K250, for Ford's sake. We also did a lot of customizations to sendmail, some of which I took with me after I left and still use on my systems now.

But, J and I were dinosaurs. The young bucks they have in there now don't know what to do if the package manager doesn't have it. Get off my lawn!