I'll take up some of these, I've already done work on some of them for maemo.

MPD I could do for sure, mplayer is a possibility. Event handling is something I might do if I have time.

For esd, what I would do is pimp up the version number, make it create symlinks to any higher versions of the libs the old esd installs to the old versions and set
Provides: esd
Replaces: esd

tags in the control file.I haven't read all of the debian policy but I'm pretty sure that would do it.

You can't build osso-esd from source unless you want an esd daemon that talks to /dev/zero

Ok, I did plan on doing that but now it seems like my debian doesn't want to boot
I'll remove the current debian and replace it with gnome.

Edit, I can't get a working deblet atm, maybe i'll restore original kernel and try installing gnome again sometime over the weekend. Or maybe KDE