You gotta walk your own path.
Most people know exactly what they have to do to obtain a skill, start a business, make a friend, experience and adventure but simply don’t out of fear of the unknown.
The Internet is helpful but you got to put stock in your own lived experience.
I’ve used Debian stable daily for 20 years.
When I was young and passionate about Linux there were lots of things that were behind and noticible. Notably big things like KDE with obvious graphical features that I could see I was missing out on.
After a few years I stop finding any excitement in upgrading at all. I became critical of pointless features and rewrites. KDE is worse if anything.
In the last 5 years there has been stuff I’ve wanted that’s existed outside the project. Docker when it came out, Wireguard. I just ended up waiting.
The only software I run outside the repositories atm is neovim and that’s because I want to use the latest Scala-metals IDE tool. That itself is becoming more stable though.