While I disagree, in the end, about breaking user applications, I can appreciate their situation. They have an upstream kernel from which they get bugfixes and

While I disagree, in the end, about breaking user applications, I can appreciate their situation. They have an upstream kernel from which they get bugfixes and patches, but which has no guarantees of stability. Any guarantees that the Debian team decides to make are their own responsibility, and could result in them maintaining multiple patches just to fix ever-more-diverging upstream releases.