That's just how it is with Debian. Philosophy is important - sometimes just as important or even more important than the releases. I like it anyway - or precisely because of this? Because no other distribution really puts so much value on the ideas of Free Software - and is really consistent in what it does.
Sure, it's annoying sometimes when releases take years to come out. On the other hand, that's exactly what the Testing and Unstable distributions are for. Although as a user, I really only use Testing, or Stable on production servers.
Backports are relatively simple and allow you to update individual packages - but of course you're then responsible for the updates yourself. Sure, for pure users that's certainly not an option - they just want to install and not compile. On the other hand, you should always keep in mind that Linux is just a Unix - and being afraid of the compiler when using Unix is pretty out of place.
One thing is certain: I've played around with many distributions and also experimented more seriously. Except for Gentoo, none really impressed me, and Gentoo is too heavy for me for smaller machines and servers - I don't really want to fire up the compiler for every package when the machine's main load is for something else (server) or it's simply too small to convert some monster packages.
At heise online news there's the original article.