That can still be ages depending on the maintainer spats. When I say maintainer spats, I'm referring to shit like how avconv was given undue credence for ages

That can still be ages depending on the maintainer spats. When I say maintainer spats, I'm referring to shit like how avconv was given undue credence for ages because the split happened right around a Debian release and the packager for ffmpeg on Debian was on the avconv side, which caused a false deprecation notice to be present for quite some time. And yes, with how quick some software moves, two to three years can very much result in a mess of hacks and patches.