I really hate to see Lucas burn out and I think the Ruby & Debian communities will both be negatively affected. I'm a Debian Ruby user whose contributed a tiny bit (first Redmine package) and I have watched Lucas and the rest of the team repeatedly bang their heads into a wall when trying to get agreement on something from either side.
My personal view is that the Ruby/GEM packages should be laid out like the Perl/CPAN, which seems to be doing just fine.
I like cpanm[1] quite a lot. Have you tried it as an alternative installer for modules? (I'm no Perl god, but I still maintain a healthy chunk of Perl code I wrote for sysadmin things a few years ago. I find that cpanm does exactly what I need it to, without the overhead of CPAN.)
My personal view is that the Ruby/GEM packages should be laid out like the Perl/CPAN, which seems to be doing just fine.
If you want to help, go to the Debian Ruby Team page (http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Ruby) and join us (http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Ruby/RubyExtras/JoiningTheTeam).