If your stable release can’t handle proper updates over its stable content, then get a better stable distro.

It is not necessarily the distro. Apart from NVidia drivers breaking and breaking grub dual boot configurations, I had most problems with GNOME upgrades.

But the key question is: Is it better to have rare, bigger changes, or frequent, smaller changes? For desktop and development, my experience slightly favours the latter. For servers, I had no problems with the Debian model.