Thanks everyone for sharing your viewpoints, it is interesting to read! I feel I need to clarify that I am not a native English speaker and my intent was to write a polite and honest email. It does not say anywhere that "you must use debian/latest". I am happy with whatever the convention is, as long as it works, and is universal at least for new packages.
I am fine if single-maintainer packages, or closed-team packages do whatever they want, as it won't affect others (at least immediately), but not having "best practice" agreed on basic things like git branches does cause unnecessary friction and time waste for those who participate in the maintenance of packages in multiple different teams, at least from my perspective. As somebody who is mentoring multiple new maintainers, I see them in particular having unnecessary hardship from lack of properly agreed conventions. For the long-term success of Debian, I think that discussing the best practices and having some things agreed is valuable, even though running the discussions does take energy.
