> I mainly got hooked on their 'testing' branch since it is just "always up to date".
Note that testing doesn't get the same level of security support as stable: "Compared to stable and unstable, next-stable testing has the worst security update speed. Don't prefer testing if security is a concern." [1]; more details: [2], [3], [4].
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting#Considerations
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/Status/Testing