I don't think the missing .md5sums files are intrinsically worrying. I've looked at several of them and they're genuinely missing. installation-report, for instance (for which I have the source to hand), just doesn't call dh_md5sums, and the same is true for a number of the other packages in the list.
Since md5sums files are created in debian/rules rather than by dpkg-deb, they're merely very widespread rather than actually universal ...
I don't think the missing .md5sums files are intrinsically worrying. I've looked at several of them and they're genuinely missing. installation- report, for instance (for which I have the source to hand), just doesn't call dh_md5sums, and the same is true for a number of the other packages in the list.
Since md5sums files are created in debian/rules rather than by dpkg-deb, they're merely very widespread rather than actually universal ...