Additionally, there aren't even any trusted repos out there building/publishing a .deb for it. The ones that I could find when I searched last were all outdated or indicated they were not going to keep moving forward.
I could get over this. But, IMO, it lends itself to asking the "why" question. Why wouldn't Podman make installing it easier? And the only thing that makes sense to me is that RedHat doesn't want their dev effort supporting their competitor's products.
That's a perfectly reasonable stance, they owe me nothing. But, it does make me feel that anything not in the RH ecosystem is going to be treated as a second-class citizen. That concerns me more than having to build my own debs.