I'm a Slackware guy, but Debian (or its derivatives like Ubuntu) is also a great distro.
Learning the apt tool chain (like apt-get) will solve most of your "dependency" problems. They only time you'll be having any is if you're hacking your distro by installing stuff by hand. There's not reason you should be getting any problems with the distro supplied installations tools (apt for Debians and pkgtools for Slackwarez)
As for the future of Debian/Linux m68k, it has always been shaky as far as I recall since the late 90's when using it on a 68k Mac... But yes, I would certainly hope they don't give up on it, because that means no more Linux on Amigas, Macs, Ataris(?), lots of Sun 68k machines, etc