For the game dev it would only be easier. For the package maintainer it would be hard - and I don’t know if they even allow non-backward-compatible updates to be made to software packages.
Also, since not all Panda versions are backward compatible, there are downsides to the just-setting-panda3d-as-dependency approach.
Do note that packpanda is designed to handle this - it packs a copy of Panda into the game itself, resulting in a .deb or .rpm. I believe it supports deb and rpm since version 1.6.0.
But anyways, I think we’re drifting away from the original purpose of this thread.