Several points jumped through my synapses reading Trio3b's post.

A thought I had many times before: are the users ready for such Linux distributions? I do not mean any technical skills, no user is supposed to learn how to create scripts and configure things by editing config files any more. But I often see that users lack the mindset, the way of thinking which is required by administrating your own *nix system. One nice example was the KDE switch to 4.x which Trio3b described as fiasco. But was this fiasco not really caused by the users demand for "the latest" although KDE stated that 4.0 (and a few following versions) were not for userland? With the proper mindset users without development skills would have stayed away from KDE 4 until it was declared as "userland-ready", which was with 4.2 [1]. This is just one example but could also be ported to other "fiascos".

As often said, Linux is a system which forces the user to be a sysadmin as well - but as a sysadmin you think different than a user does. IMHO this is one point which is not communicated enough to the user. Of course, marketing would have a fit seeing the question "Are you ready to be a sysadmin?" all over the portal site of our Linux distribution. But isn't this really the question here when we talk about backports, updates, rolling releases and all the rest? These are expressions and tasks for a sysadmin, not a user.

In business we do have IT departments and sysadmins who care for those things - your average Dilbert in his cubicle is not supposed to care for updates. But for the user at home we see this dual personality with the different mindsets to be a given fact. Is that so?

As you can see, I did not aim at a certain conclusion here, I just let my thoughts roam free (could well be an exposé for a editor's article).

[1] Of course, for the real "fiasco" we have to blame a certain distribution as well which could not wait to be "the first to offer the new KDE!" and thus caused other distributions to follow.