Is PackageMaker considered the standard for Mac OS X software installation? Or is there something else out there?

I've put together my very first package with PackageMaker (for a system service), but I am not happy about several faults:

• Frequent crashes while applying target permissions to my source files
• Package source files are not automatically or easily refreshed
• File filter does not work

Is there something else out there more capable of this task? Free is not a requirement.

Yes it is, and yes it's buggy. Apple uses the command line version pretty much exclusively so the GUI tends to have the feeling that it's been slapped together by a summer intern and never tested.