Well, sure, but equally I think there would have been a lot more effort to fix the packaging nightmare if it had been more urgent.

There was a massive effort though, the proliferation of several different package managers is evidence of that.

Maybe. A lot of them felt like one-person projects that not many people cared about. I think that on the contrary, part of the reason so many different package managers could coexist with no clear winner emerging was that the problem wasn't very serious for a lot of the community.