MAAS should provide an easy way to add PPAs on a per-system or per-tag basis

This certainly makes sense as a feature. But I think it will have more chance of getting to the roadmap as part of an enhancement to the cloud-init feature that @billwear pointed to.

I agree that currently using cloud-init for your use case is not really useful. But we’ve talked about making it so that you can upload a cloud-init script to MAAS and have it being applied to machines with a certain tag on deploy.