release confusion

[John Dangler]

I'm a bit confused...
I'm running Dapper 6.06LTS on all of my desktop, laptop, and server
systems because I think that this is the latest stable release of
Ubuntu.  But, I just visited ubuntuguide.org (wiki) which says that I'm
wrong.  Edgy Eft (6.10) has been released since Oct. 06.  Yet I still
see lots of user community messages about how things just don't work in
Edgy.

Why has it been in release for over 3 months when there are still so
many problems with it?

I've been trying to get webcam and printing to work since Hoary, and
still can't get it right (among some other small irritations)...

I switched my 'end user' systems to Ubuntu from other distro's for the
stability, but I'm beginning to get the notion that would be a bad
premise for the switch...
( I was shunned on the Gentoo channels because I wouldn't update and
rebuild my kernel every other day).

I am a lifelong proponent of *ix OS's, but could we just hold up for a
second and get all of the basic pieces working before trying to make
quantum leaps?  (I just don't have enough physical boxes to keep
bouncing from one major release to the next to 'try out the next
version' and see if all of the hardware/software issues have been at
least partially resolved...