I had successfully populated the packagelist in the beta/release, with a hit & miss approach. I, too, "eventually" saw the catalog populate, but was uncertain what the trigger, or eventual URL actually was.
Now that I've updated my production server which offers supports for the package manager, I've lost my repository entry & I am again struggling to reimport the APS Package Installer library.
Can you please share what the URL is that you've used to access the library?
Many thanks,
jadik