At one point I was interested in writing a ruby backend for this, but
got distracted and moved to other focus, but I think it solves what you
are talking about, without need to develop a large project like a GUI.
I have been keeping an eye on pkgme, but I'm not sure it solves the problem. My concern with automated tools is that they tend to to work for about 75% of stuff, but there's always a substantial proportion of things that just do something a little bit odd, and the automatic tool can't handle them. So I have to understand what the automation is doing, to deal with the things it can't do for me.
To give more concrete examples, we have stdeb for Python packages, and debhelper, which can guess much of the standard process of building a package (such as running 'make' or 'setup.py'). But neither can handle enough real-world cases that new packagers can use it without thinking about what's happening.
I tried writing an application with Quickly a couple of months ago, and I was impressed with how well 'quickly package' (which uses pkgme) worked. But a lot of things that I'd like to see packaged aren't developed with Quickly, and I'm not confident that pkgme can do such a good job with them.