It's not *that* bad. I mean, the need for such a tool. This is a way for the user to "correct" a maintainer decision to depend on this on that. Debian has the "equivs" program for that (which does essentially the same as fkdep, but fkdep is much cooler because of its rawness
I left Debian and continued happily with Slackware. In 2010 I gave it a try again (first Ubuntu, then Debian) and it continues to hurt, but I've learned to live with it
(and don't get me started with SuSE,