Comment 21 for bug 932834

It's not clear what themuso was referring to back in 2012, but as nevion alluded to above, qpaeq is 'just' a Python program.
It's the GUI required (absent equivalent software) for the end-user to do something useful with the capability exposed by the modules (which do come stock, but aren't loaded by default).

See: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/plain/src/utils/qpaeq

Perhaps the problematic dependency back then was PyQt4 or sip? Or not, this is what's known as "unfounded speculation" on my part.