Noob question?

Should I've made a new post instead?

You do seem confused though... Debian is both a distribution and a packaging system...

Yes, Debian is a popular distro depending on Debian packages. My concern is about the update policy of the distro

But the whole reason debian-based distros exist is because some people think they can strike a better balance between newness and stability.

Debian is pure stability, not the balance between stability and newness. If you mean debian-BASED in particular, trying to introduce more newness with custom repos, I don't think that is a good strategy to get balance. The custom additional repos quickly become too outdated as well. Also, the custom repos can't account for the outdatedness of every single Debian package.

you seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater... the debian packaging system is very robust and is not intrinsically unlikely to be updated.

Yes, I don't understand/approve the philosophy around the update policy of Debian. It doesn't make sense to me for desktop usage. The technology of the package system however is great and apt is very fast