This question is about the ease of package creation and not about the merits of dpkg, rpm or anything related.

I'm a long time Slackware user and I am used to creating Slackware packages. And while Slackware is still my preferred distro, I will probably have much less time in the near future to spend on tinkering with my computer so I think about moving on to a more "user-friendly" distro, in the sense of a distro which has a lot of well-tested packages available. I have shortlisted some distros right now and it's still a mix of rpm and dpkg-based.

One think I do not want to give up is the ability to create my own packages. Although I certainly do expect to create a package only once in a while, I wouldn't feel at ease if I was unable to do so. I am not after source-based distros, since lack of time is my motivation to move on.

So my question to people who have experience creating .rpm and .deb files is: which ones are easier / quicker / simpler to create?

When I have to roll a package myself, I mostly use checkinstall. In that case, the creation and installation is exactly the same - pretty easy. That said, as I'm sure you know, checkinstall doesn't quite give you the control of the full package creation path, and on that I cannot comment as I have no experience.

Yes I know about checkinstall but I don't know in how far it plays well with the different distros such as Suse, Ubuntu or Fedora. In any case this would be the last resort only since it gives you very little control.