Saw the post here regarding CentOS’s off-springs and a couple of people brought up the excellent point of: why play with fire? Let’s just stick to Debian.
The only disadvantage I currently see is the outdated packages, and I’m curious whether makedeb solves them. Does anyone here use it regularly? How stable and comfortable is it? Did you write your own PKGBUILDs?
Another alternative could be Distrobox. Added benefit of the apps being sandboxed, and easily removed in case of issues. Downside is that you are eating up some space with some extra OS images.