Financially for us it makes zero sense to "spend a few hours" with each distro, validate and properly document and provide continuous support for absolutely everything on the marketplace.
That is a fair statement I can accept.
However, I don't understand how that ties in with your other statements.
As a practical example, when your users clamor for a Linux version, or a package for a particular distribution, you tell them how much it would cost to produce, and how many units you'd need to sell for that to be practical, in rough numbers. There is no appeasing needed. If that is a regular question, I'd put it in a FAQ section for that product.
Your post only showcases a typical Linux fan that cannot take criticism for someone that lives a different reality than yours.
Criticism? I missed that. All I saw was demands for change for your particular business to be easier.
(I also would not label myself as a "fan", more like developer. And please do bear in mind that I did run a successful IT business, part of which was developing, customizing, and installing Linux stuff, for almost a decade. It did break me -- not the Linux part, I still do that for fun; the business part did. I am too much of a problem-solving-junkie rather than a business person to be able to run a business successfully without damaging myself. Nevertheless, the business was profitable up to the year I broke, and was shut down in an orderly manner, not via bankrupt or similar. I think I've described this in detail elsewhere on this forum.)
The problem I have with a few businesses is that they refuse to make profit when it comes to Linux, because they are unwilling to change their business practices to match the sector. I do not understand why they refuse to make a profit. It does not compute.
I have that same problem with many, many other business fields. Media, and their insistence on "protection" (which is not), is a good example. I thought otherwise until I read
Baen Books' Eric Flint's essays about the effect of Digital Rights Management, and how getting rid of it increased their sales (for some authors, like 5×). The same observations match my own experiences in other media fields.
Consider, for example, the fact that even now, there is no officially licensed way of playing Blu-Ray discs on Linux. That is, you
cannot buy an officially licensed player for Linux. The reasons for this are not technical (if you disagree, I can explain exactly how a player strictly licensed for one combination of hardware can be implemented, and how to implement the surrounding licensing in a way that keeps the users well "appeased"), so they can only be political. And I do not understand why a company would refuse to make money; I am surprised why their shareholders are not putting the executives to task.
The only explanation for that political stance I have, based on my discussions with people in Finland who make large-scale software choices and invariably lean towards Microsoft or other large firms (that have as low as 33% success rate with large-scale software projects in Finland, but which does not seem to have any effect in their business), is that the untrue statements spread by Microsoft between 1997 and 2015 or so, have been integrated into the minds of the nontechnical decision-makers. That annoys me.
From your (rjsouza) description I understood that your business counted among those. That the profit margin would be there, except that you see it as "wrong" to provide packages for individual distributions, because they "should" instead provide one package format that worked for every Linux distro; that Linux being fragmented to a number of distributions is harmful, because it does not work for you.
If I misunderstood, and providing localized/distribution-specific packages is simply non-feasible financially, I do apologize: I know that situation as well, and it can be very irritating; but it only applies to rather small/low-cost software projects. It is, also, not nearly as common as the profit-exists-but-we-refuse case, the examples for which I've listed above.
Thus far, I have not encountered a single business that does the cross-distribution packaging right. I do count my Canadian friend selling proprietary Linux stuff in this category; he too does not have the resources to do it right
yet. I have discussed the matter with him, but providing it as a simple encompressed tar archive works for him for now.
TL;DR:
If the problem is that packaging the software for different distributions is too expensive (there is not enough profit to do that), there are better ways of lowering that cost than demanding the business sector change, or lambasting Linux users or developers as difficult.
One way to do that is to put a call out for users/developers to repackage the software and/or port the documentation for their preferred Linux distribution, with the express intent of finding out how expensive it would be to verify and maintain those. Some businesses have a separate section for community-maintained packaging/documentation; that could be an option.
Another way would be to pay an one-off fee for a proper Linux consultant to package and document the software for the top five widely used distributions. This is a business risk, but a very simple and easy to manage one. This would be my suggestion.