I can't help but feel like they have the wrong priorities, if they waste time on such nonsense at this stage of the project.

If it is, then barely so.
Back in the days when the Neo900 still looked like becoming real in a reasonable amount of time, Sebastian Krzyszkowiak (@dos1) said he'd make sure that SHR would run on the Neo900 running Debian. SHR uses FSO as a backend. Both were included in the official Debian repo at that time (Wheezy was "Stable" then), they were installlable and they ran more or less fine (I had no modem for actual tests and the UI was somewhat unstable, but at least it came up and seemed to run fine in my dry runs until it crashed for reasons I didn't find out).
After the Jessie release some of the FSO background processes weren't able to start, neither with Systemd (which became the new default init System in Jessie), nor with SysV, nor manually. It was quite obvious to me, that nobody actually tested these packages during the Jessie release cycle. So I filed a bug report and the packages were removed from Debian for not being maintained.