In Debian unstable, many of the packages are submitted from upstreams (eg. the folks that made the software.) The bar is simply "Debian developer" uploads the

In Debian unstable, many of the packages are submitted from upstreams (eg. the folks that made the software.) The bar is simply "Debian developer" uploads the package, as I understand it. The Debian developer may or may not be the upstream source. In Debian testing and stable, you're getting software that has been through a longer and involved peer review process by Debian maintainers. That's not ridiculous, that's why you would use a stable distro in the first place. Because it doesn't put so much trust in upstream vendors to always put out consistently good production-quality releases without adding any new bugs in them. I don't recommend using stable distros for anything but production machines, and those you keep to approximate them (like say, staging machines).