And in 2 years, when we take a peak we see that the changes amassed in between by the non LTS releases are so big we have to pretty much rewrite all of our codebase if we want to continue getting support....
Other apps that require binary add ons required me to install the latest versions from NPM -- one one of them required ANY changes to how the API was called and it was extremely minor.
Waiting 2 years to upgrade the engine your code is running on is not horrible and requires much less pain
I think I'll just add Node 5.0 to CI and see if it passes and that's all there is to it really.
More or Less, Joyent was mostly doing what they were doing for a reason. What the io.js team is doing also has validity but fundamentally you will always see these issues to some extent because of the philosophy behind it.