Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. I love Debian, but its packages are often very stale. That's why many end up using Ubuntu. And yes, I get that package review takes time, and that Debian is arguably more secure. But that's little consolation when you're dead in the water because what's packaged is too old.
If Ubuntu is the not stale alternative to Debian (stable), then I can't imagine how bad the situation is there. I often build software myself because Ubuntu is very often stale.
I'm wondering if the periodic freeze-the-universe model that many distros use reflects a world that doesn't really exist anymore where distros came on DVDs (or CDs, or floppies). Whatever version you had on the disc, that's the version you're going to use.
I just started playing with FreeBSD in a VM, which has a frozen base system and constantly-updated packages separate from it. This works better for software you don't think of as an "OS component" but the question then becomes where you draw the line.
Or maybe it's just a fundamental disconnect between consumer-facing "move fast and break things" and enterprise-level "never break anything even if it means you can't move at all" and there's no way to make software that works for both.