From what I understand it was withdrawn as a vote „in favor of the goals of the commission“ was not guaranteed. In part because Germany announced its decision to withdraw support yesterday. Seems to be standard behavior.

I think it’s an US thing. Have yet to encounter something like that in Europe.

Nala is a great apt frontend. It supports parallel downloads of packages and speeds up the whole process up a lot.

Not sure which commands irk you as too long. Nala makes a good overview of changes like which package is bumped to what version and where it stands now. So I basically only use

nala upgrade

and take it from there. Updates the sources, lists the diff for upgradable packages and ask me to go forward or abort.