We have to go with Debian stable. Debian testing has presented too many obstacles to stability. We have an obligation to ship stable software to our customers.
I think this is the core of the problem. We need both a reasonable degree of stability and frequent updates to user-facing things, which requires fresh versions of large parts of the stack. Debian stable is moving way too slowly for that, but it sounds like there is no good alternative to it at the moment.
If we're committed to Debian as our base, perhaps we should propose overhauling the release model or adding a separate stream of stable, but more frequent releases that would allow a release cadence more in line with the needs of a consumer-facing OS (i.e. major updates once or twice a year). I assume others might be interested in this as well, seeing as it's exactly what Ubuntu et al. are doing on top of Debian already.
I'd like to see if we can't discuss this with GNOME. Integration and release cadence really could be better coordinated with Debian I feel especially given that the current GNOME Foundation director is a DD,
That would be a great start :)
I know that the foundation (and GNOME community more generally) would be really interested in a nightly OS developers can dogfood, so perhaps there is collaboration potential there.
but perhaps there's work behind the scenes going on already that I don't know about.
Not as far as I know, but would be good to look into that.
Cheers, Tobias