I absolutely love that you describe PikaOS as porno filthy. No judgement, no defense, no argument, I just think it's a hilarious description while perfectly making your point, and is pretty much the best thing I've read today. Thank you!

And just to stay on-topic, yeah I've found flatpak invaluable in working around some of debian's unfortunate packaging limitations. I try to use the debian packages first if possible, but if the version is too old, not available, or has crappy dependency conflicts, flatpak to the rescue!

I don't disagree, but at the same time it's a choice the community has taken that completely walls off a large population of potential users.

as someone else said though, there are other distros based on Debian that attempt to rectify that.