Yeah, this is one of the main things sited as a drawback to the Debian
distribution....packages are sometimes a little older than in other
distributions. But, this is because the Debian developers spend so much
time making sure that they work properly in the distribution before they
are released in the repositories. As a result, things change a lot less
frequently. The benefit of this is that Debian is 'stable' in all
senses of the word...few serious bugs and system instability, and little
or no instability in what is part of the distribution. For many people,
especially businesses, this stability is important. For others, like
myself, I can afford a little more instability, and so can deal with any
instability in testing for the benefit of getting newer versions of the
packages and run Testing (Stretch). Many people also run Experimental
(Sid) for the benefit of bleeding-edge versions of software, but a lot
of instability (in all senses of the word).