I think the one of the biggest things for me about stable/LTS distros aside from dealing with "old, crusty stuff", is that said software is upgraded all at once every two or three years. Doing 5 or 10 minutes of work a month looking into changelogs for packages and adjusting settings and what not is much more managable than having everything change underneath you all at once, possibly by several major versions. Its almost a miracle that stable->stable upgrades even work.