#1013194: Development Modules Not Recognized and #1013192: Better Groupings/Group Names for Developer Modules both relate to an effort of having a few common modules always available without needing them to be part of every installation profile you use.

However, the more I think about it, the more I realize that this is one area that you are going to have trouble getting developers to agree one what they want. Rather than building an ad-hock project specification system, it would be really cool if Drubuntu simply shipped with a default Drush Makefile which users could override: $> cp default.developer.make developer.make or specify as an argument when creating a new platform.

Drush make might need #820954: Update core and modules with Drush make and one or two other things before this would really work smoothly. It would not replace #1013194: Development Modules Not Recognized, though it may invalidate the specific approach currently being worked on there.