It's not trivial to do performance comparisons correctly, you'd have to provide a lot more detail about the tests to get proper feedback on it. Ideally the test

It's not trivial to do performance comparisons correctly, you'd have to provide a lot more detail about the tests to get proper feedback on it. Ideally the test would be something that anybody can download and run locally themselves. As far as the package repository for your distro not having the latest version of something, this is very very common. Your best bet is to build your own package from source, or find an alternate repository to use where somebody is building packages of the newer versions.