That's what Debian backports (https://backports.debian.org/ https://backports.debian.org/) are for. Best of both worlds - run stable as your base distribution,

That's what Debian backports (https://backports.debian.org/ https://backports.debian.org/) are for. Best of both worlds - run stable as your base distribution, use backports whenever you need a more recent version of something. E.g. Debian stable comes with kernel 3.16, but 4.8 is available as an official backport, should you need the (almost) latest and greatest. Just add backports to sources.list && apt update && apt -t jessie-backports install linux-image-amd64.