That’s very fair. Everyone has a different use for Pi’s, and I just happen to favor long-lived devices that can be updated easily. I wish more of the pi internals were upstreamed too.

I believe you may have found your ideal OS. Debian will always lag behind ever so often. And that’s okay. We all use the Pi’s for different reasons.

This is probably a hot take, but:

I disagree. The OS doesn’t run a mainline kernel, and the Raspberry Pi devs recommend a clean slate on OS upgrades. Granted, they do some trickery for performance with their Zero (not 2) line, using armhf instead of the slower armel, but this doesn’t excuse the fact that Raspberry Pi OS is so brittle. The builds are also still on 32-bit, even though every Pi since 3B can run 64-bit OSes.

I just run Debian on mine. Can’t be assed to clean flash my devices each major update.