I've always been intimidated by the number of little tools and configuration options when building Debian packages. In the end, it's not very hard, and the format is quite reasonable, it just feels more complicated than it is.
I'm maintaining cargo-deb that builds a .deb from a Rust/Cargo binary project with no configuration needed.
The main source of complexity isn't the .deb format, but the tooling and infrastructure around the format. It's mired in overcomplexity, and it's very much still in a '90s mindset of building locally with multiple layers of Perl-based tools. If it was rethought to be git-native using docker images or equivalent then it could be of equivalent simplicity to other contemporary systems. When I look at what you can do with the FreeBSD ports and Poudriere or with Homebrew and other systems, I see how much of the complexity has been added incidentally and incrementally, with good intentions, but a radical rethink of the basic workflows are necessary to consolidate and simplify them.
[I used to maintain sbuild and was the author of schroot back in the day]
I'm maintaining cargo-deb that builds a .deb from a Rust/Cargo binary project with no configuration needed.