Perhaps one nice approach would be if things were a bit more consistently standardized with regards to where programs go and what they change, such that the developers of major programs could maintain their own stable repositories used by Ubuntu by default.
Thats why I only consider doing Linux versions for mature Linux distributions. Not "up visualized build your distro" Distributions.
To me, currently all have to get their features, stability, updates *with in cycle kernel patches and new KDE betas as optional possibility* and standardization compared against Mandriva One 2008 ... and so far the only one that stood a chance was XandrOS which sadly is worse than apple when it comes to the time frame you have to buy a new OS to get current versions updates any further.