Seeking consensus on dh

I know enough about .deb files and practice that I've written tooling and scripts to do mass investigations of how customers have broken their systems etc, or how my former employer's release team had broken our customers etc. I've created shim packages to avoid installing things that the package graph required. But I still have no idea how to go about creating a sane debian developer style package, despite trying.

I'm sure it's possible to succeed from the published docs, but I'd bet most developers start out by cribbing from another package.