I think the FreedomBox project being a Debian pure blend in hindsight was a critical mistake. They would have made more progress faster and been able to support more Free Software apps if there wasn't a requirement to have everything upstreamed.

The reason why they made that decision is understandable though. Things which are upstreamed are actively maintained. But upstream Debian has a problem in that many web apps are not distributed in "the Debian way" with separately packaged dependencies. It's why there was a tussle over Owncloud.