All problems (or almost all of them) can be caught by using better testing.. That doesn't mean that some tools aren't better than others.
On my production servers, I don't care about not being on the very edge of all technology. I'd prefer something highly secure and stable where all the code can run safely. I also want a very strong community with outstanding documentation. So, all in all, for my use cases, I think going with Ubuntu is a smarter choice. It doesn't mean that I don't use archlinux every day on my own machines where I can have fun screwing it up and hacking it back.
And, just for the notice, that were only small examples, but I'm talking more generally about backward compatibility and expected behavior. A very good example is jquery.. I'm not worried about getting the last update. It's not like ".click" would stop working. Contrast that to others less mature technology (such as express for node.js) where it can be pretty scary to update packages. You better have a gigantic test suites to upgrade without fear of breaking something.
