Spacing major releases out by five years doesn't guarantee that the bug fixes and driver updates you want will make it into the stable release. It's completely plausible that volunteers will instead develop on HEAD and commit their work there, and the changes won't be merged to the stable branch at all.
I started as a FreeBSD developer in the 4.x era. It was somewhat of an anomaly. The SMP work that went into (and delayed) 5-CURRENT was absolutely necessary, but it introduced significant instability and ongoing breakage. That was a strong disincentive to using it as a day-to-day development platform. I needed a stable development and build machine, so it ran 4.x.
Since then as a project we've done increasingly well at keeping -CURRENT in a working state. It is completely feasible for a volunteer developer to run only -CURRENT.
I started as a FreeBSD developer in the 4.x era. It was somewhat of an anomaly. The SMP work that went into (and delayed) 5-CURRENT was absolutely necessary, but it introduced significant instability and ongoing breakage. That was a strong disincentive to using it as a day-to-day development platform. I needed a stable development and build machine, so it ran 4.x.
Since then as a project we've done increasingly well at keeping -CURRENT in a working state. It is completely feasible for a volunteer developer to run only -CURRENT.