It really comes down to if you are trying to use newer hardware or not. Debian based systems usually run fine out of the box on older systems.
For newer hardware your going to want new drivers and kernel versions which you get with a rolling release distro.
I get what you are saying but your entire post dances around the actual problem. All of this is fine if there was actually good software. Ive yet to see any killer app or must have software. If there were really good games it would make the hardware short comings less important. Even apple with their typically polished experiences seems to have just dumped their headset on the market and hope for the best.