Responding to both posts...

I see no need to have things statically linked in order to be independently downloadable; links to where you can find those libraries (or, perhaps, mirroring the libraries) is much more sane.

But the whole point of repositories is so you don't have "dependency hell". If you have those problems, it's an issue of how the repositories are set up, how many of them there are, etc.; fixing that (by using maemo.org extras repo, mainly) is what GA, Tex, and others are advocating, and will avoid both "dependency hell" and every app having its own version of every (non-stock OS) library statically linked in.

FWIW, I don't often finding dependency hunting especially hellious when using a dependency-less packaging system (slackware fanboy here!); and it's not all that bad when using dpkg. But I recognize that there are indeed "many people", as you say, who would quit because they have no knowledge. That's why apt-get install $PACKAGE is supposed to just work.