Indeed, for myself I prefer stable releases (Debian, Ubuntu LTS, etc) and use apt pinning so that I can use newer versions of apps that I need to use. Very rarely will I have a problem; in fact the few times there is a problem it is normally solved by apt-get source ; dpkg-buildpackage.
It depends, normally in order of preference LTS, LTS backports, then latest release. So then if you want the newer version you can do apt-get install <package>/<release>. I typically use Apt::Default-Release "<release>" in a separate apt.conf.d file.
