That makes sense, it sounds like you have some consternation with Docker itself rather than with the container distribution of Citadel. Do you think you'd feel the same way about snap, flatpak, or appimage?

I think if I had a choice, I'd love to just get a modern version of Citadel into the debian repositories (which would then cascade out to ubuntu and other derivatives) so people could just grab the package and go. And we used to have such packages available. Unfortunately they get out of date very quickly, which doesn't work well here. Also there is a requirement for packages to be FHS compliant. We used to have a FHS installation mode but it added so much complexity and bugginess to the system that we eventually dropped it.

So today, the only real choices are the build script and the Docker container.
Both work reasonably well but I'd love to make it even easier.