I would hardly call it a pain, it takes me all of 3 minutes to write a .spec for most python packages and from there it's basically 'tito release'. Sure, if I wanted to package for debian-based distributions it'd take a little more time, but it's worth it to make a quality package that a distribution itself can decide to pick up (packagers love other people doing the work for them, though they won't refuse doing it themselves) with minimal effort.
And it took me all of 60 minutes to learn, packaging isn't anywhere near as hard as people make it out to be. If you can use a build system of your choosing to build and test your project, you can learn how to write an rpmspec or debian control file in under an hour.
