Debian seems to want you to be 'all in' on contributing

You're right; it's extraordinarily difficult (to the point of probably not being humanly possible) to produce compliant packages by reading the documentation alone. For my own package, I was only able to make progress on it after joining the #debian-mentors IRC channel on OFTC; they were very helpful there. (although there was still the problem of conflicting advice over which packaging tools to use!)

My package is very simple; 5000 lines of architecture-independent code with only one extraordinarily stable dependency, and it still took over a month of work to get the package to the point where it could successfully build without warnings. But even that on its own doesn't get you anything; you still have to find a sponsor for your package; I've been waiting on that for 8 months and would not be at all surprised if it takes 18 more.

I was struck by the vast difference between the experience of Debian as a user (flawless anarchist utopia, every action you take succeeds with effortless grace, boundless opportunities beckon at a single command) and Debian as a packager (trudge thru rancid error messages, documentation assumes you are already an expert packager who wants to package a program that uses gnu autotools, every tool you encounter is a rewrite of a rewrite of a rewrite, jargon includes many words deployed as the opposite of their normal meaning)