Sadly I was never able to watch this famed stability...

One other thought, a thing I really didn't touch on: you say your father prefers stability over anything else, but Debian really _can't_ provide both stability and brand new kernels. The kernel dev process is completely borked from a stability-lover's perspective; the two-month cycle times, with vast numbers of new features going in every sixty days, is completely antithetical to anything resembling a truly trustworthy or secure machine.

That dev cycle has put me through hell. I used to track linux.org kernels, but I haven't for years now, because they're such a mess. Their focus on features features features has cost me hundreds of personal dollars in replaced hardware that didn't need replacing, and uncounted hours dealing with server crashes.

I just don't see any way that Debian can both provide stability AND anything resembling a current kernel, because stability means 'no new features'. But the kernel team refuses to ever let anything shake out, and they don't backport much of anything.

I don't think you should be blaming the Debian team for this. I think they do an amazing job of extracting user-level stability from a programmer-oriented wankfest. Their inability to provide a stable kernel with recent hardware support is a problem with the kernel team, not the distro.