I interpreted your post as implying that the introduction of a package manager as the turning point where you lost interest. Did I get that wrong or are there arguments against package managers that I've missed out on? I understand the dislike or particular implementations, but I had thought that the general idea of automated package management was generally considered a net positive.
Some of it is that all the implementations suck, but I think that's just a symptom of the root problem: package managers are the opposite of simple. They take control away from users and developers and put them into the hands of whoever is managing repositories. They don't let you decide where applications get stored, often won't let you have multiple versions, add an unnecessary layer between the developer and the user, and generally put you up the creek without a paddle if something goes wrong. There are a lot of reasons to not like package managers if you look around.
You've never had your apt database get corrupted? It's an experience you remember, because it means you can never install or uninstall anything ever again. Maybe they've improved on that somehow since it has last happened to me.
Haiku's package manager makes that problem impossible, though, because there is no "installed files" database; whatever packages are in the "activated-packages" file get mounted on startup. If that file doesn't exist, it mounts everything in `/system/packages`. And if that's in an inconsistent state, you can boot into a previous state from the bootloader menu. And if that still doesn't work, you can copy a working `packages` directory from another Haiku install.
