I've spoken with the buildd maintainers, and they were entirely unsympathetic to the idea that parallel building on their systems might be a problem, or that it might be a good idea for debhelper to support parallel building by default as a way to get more than a small fraction of Debian packages to manually test and enable parallelism.
For the curious: The rationalle for the buildds building in parallel by default seems to be just to get faster builds of the few large packages that support it. Apparently there is something preventing them from instead building more than one package in parallel on multi-core buildds, though I don't understand what. I'm disappointed, but there's nothing more I can do; I will disable parallel building by default in debhelper. FWIW, re-enabling it in v8 is a possibility, but it puts an annoying burden on the package maintainer who wants to update to v8 for some other reason. They would have to test parallel builds of their package. Which can take longer than the rest of the process of increasing the compat level, and is always prone to missing failure modes (like -j2 working but -j3 failing, or -j2 working 75% of the time but failing occasionally due to a race, etc). -- see shy jo
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