Thoughts on makedeb, Debian's unofficial makepkg clone that comes with its own version of the AUR as well?

Saw the post here regarding CentOS's off-springs and a couple of people brought up the excellent point of: why play with fire? Let's just stick to Debian.

The only disadvantage I currently see is the outdated packages, and I'm curious whether makedeb solves them. Does anyone here use it regularly? How stable and comfortable is it? Did you write your own PKGBUILDs?