Hi Andreas,
Wouldn't it be attractive for you to come closer to Debian?
I think we'd all be very happy for 64 Studio to be officially recognised by the Debian project. But developing independently allows us to make our own decisions on issues like shipping audio interface firmware, to give an example which is very important for our niche users.
Nevertheless, we do try to stay very close to official Debian as far as core packages are concerned, and we don't replace the word 'Debian' in package information, installer boot screens and so on. Our intention is to make a major release based on each Debian stable release, and improve packages inside Debian whenever possible.
Cheers! Daniel