Sorry Adam, I hadn't been checking the bug page, so I didn't see your message from July. (I'm on the debian-devel-games mailing list, but not on debian-mentors.)
The issue with libjpeg is that I'm relying on the JCS_EXT_BGRA extention in libjpeg-turbo to decode JPEGs in the proper byte order for on-screen display. The ordinary libjpeg does not provide that extension. But, I suppose I could switch to putting the Debian-specific option first, since I don't think Ubuntu / Launchpad has issues with the "|" syntax. Or I could just use plain libjpeg-dev and trust that everyone building the package is on an OS where that means libjpeg-turbo, but that seems risky.
The other changes sound easy, so if you let me know what you think is a good approach for libjpeg, I can upload a fixed package.