Would it be possible to backport the continuous build to something like precise, CentOS 6, or debian oldstable, so that we could point people there? Right now, the appstreamcli version coming with distribution is outdated almost all of the time, giving false results (example).

By providing a backport, the resulting deb/rpm would be expected to run almost everywhere. I could even make an AppImage for it, bundling it with the required libraries.