packages or DMGs?

I switched to r211 (1.5) because of the pesky issues with iLifeSupport 9.0.3 (I had no luck separating the installers, as some have suggested). In my 1.4 buildtrains I could use .pkg files to install but now all symlinks in the CustomPKG dir pointing at .pkgs are failing; InstaDMG doesn't give me an error when it is processing these installers but nothing gets installed to disk. Is this a new feature of 1.5? What is the best method to convert .pkg files to .dmg? Just use Disk Utility? A.