Without wanting to point fingers, a significant source of opposition toshipping more than one variant is the security team (with, IMO, fairly good reasoning).
Could you (or someone else) explain their reasoning? I talked to some of them at DebConf, and I got the impression they were pointing at the Release Team. It would be good to know exactly what the problem is, and then we can start solving it.
If there's anything the Debian MySQL Maintainers team or upstream can do, I'm sure we can work something out.
Regards, Norvald H. Ryeng