One of the problems is that if you stick with stock 10.04 then the world
will pass you by. If a new OOO, GIMP or new kernel comes out then you will
not get it. The solution is to enable backports which many users do not do.

I installed Debian 5 recently and the kernel is so old (2 years old) that my
Wacom Bamboo tablet did not work without editing xorg.conf. In Ubuntu 10.04
it just works because the latest kernel includes drivers for it. We forget
that it is a moving target. The kernel keeps on getting better. As it
improves life gets easier. The cost of stability is to get left behind. I
always install the latest version of Ubuntu (since 2005) and have never
experienced a single problem that caused me to lose data or inconvenienced
me.