Have you considered the Backports for Debian? It solves the problem of glacial updates for many people - just add some of the packages you want, like Firefox and such.

I've been using Unstable for a couple of years now (updating every few days) and it has only broke once or twice in the entire time. Sure, it took me a couple of hours initially to configure it just as I wanted it, but I never feel like I'm doing "maintenance work".

One of the problems with Ubuntu is that it loads too much damn stuff, which increases the probability of breakage. My base desktop - the stuff that gets loaded after logging in - is just X, Awesome, Wicd and XScreensaver.