Letting unprivileged users benefit from packages

I don't have time to read the discussion (largely rehashed from prior discussions, I imagine) about the advantages and disadvantages of letting any user request system-wide package installation, but there are various working environments where letting users benefit from distribution packages would be a hugely beneficial thing. Of course, such packages would be installed as owned by the user, in the user's own area, and wouldn't be able to interact with privileged resources.

A while back, I took debootstrap, fakeroot and fakechroot and made a small project which combined them to let me install user-local packages on Debian/Ubuntu systems. While this was likely to be incomplete and possibly flawed (and unnecessary on my own personal machine), it would be hugely beneficial for me at work where I'm between a rock (being an unprivileged user on a Red Hat system) and a hard place (having to endure the usual institution-wide policies about software installation). Maybe I can use febootstrap and find a Fedora repository which is compatible with RHEL.

Not letting unprivileged users benefit from the system packaging infrastructure just drives people to niche package distribution systems like CPAN, Ruby Gems and Python's easy_install. Although these systems have their adherents, they are poor replacements for the infrastructure that may already be in place, but which is inaccessible to the disempowered end-user.

I'd like to see end-user package management done the right way: harnessing RPMs and Debian packages under the user's own privileges in order to automate (or bypass, really) the grunt-work of having to {.configure, make, make install} a bunch of libraries just to have access to a benign application that isn't likely to get installed by an administrator.