SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

yes, but unless you run a source distro like Gentoo you may not have the dev files for everything on your system and lots of users are fairly averse to compiling themselves, plus a source distro can hit problems that DO NOT EVER hit binary distros (including people with misbehaving build systems, automagic deps (weather it ends up depending on another package being installed changes if the other package is installed a build time or not, with no way to turn this behavior off))

Also people are going to want to use pre-compiled code, and most people don't really want to learn how to package their stuff for every distro ever, let alone actually compile it 20 or 30 times.