What complicated it is that usually when you were coming to Debian you were coming from Slackware or a BSD, so everything you knew about init systems and software distribution went out the window. Where's rc.local? Why did ./configure && make && make install destroy my system? Also: we're talking about 20 years ago: everything was harder then.
If you came from a BSD, then you (were supposed to) already know why make install is not a good idea. Although Debian package management was not particularly similar to FreeBSD ports and packages, the fundamental idea was the same.
