Regarding package management, apart from deb and RPM you have other formats like tgz, pacman, and with differences in package naming conventions (gtk may be called gtk+ in some distributions, GTK in others and so on), handling dependencies across distributions can be a major pain for software vendors. Wouldn't it be better for software to be distributed as a binary tar.bz2 file, which can simply be extracted to a directory and run from there. "Dependencies" will have to be handled by the user, but with a simple text file listing these, it should be no major problem.
I agree with you about desktop environments, it doesn't make sense to have a single one, different people have different likes/needs. It would be better to have common settings between different desktop environments, like a common menu system (freedesktop.org works towards such things, I believe).
About toolkits, well GTK and Qt are found on nearly every distribution out of the box, but some software depend on other less common ones, which result in extra dependencies and inconsistancy in user interface.
And lastly, I didn't intend to start any fights, emacs users can go on using emacs, and vi users (self included) can go on with vi, regardless of what comes from the linux standards base and freedesktop.org
