This is how you drop the ball on your users:
"LMDE was a rolling distribution for a while and eventually turned into a semi-rolling distribution. This was good at the time (among other things it made it possible for LMDE users to enjoy Cinnamon while it was still using a GNOME backend) but it also presented challenges and caused issues. The biggest issue in LMDE was the fact that it required a lot more maintenance than Linux Mint but that it had far less users. This hurt the frequency of updates it received but also the quality of the distribution.. since so much efforts were put in the base, very few LMDE-specific developments were made."
yeah, well... it's just it's not really a 'rolling release' if they don't even update their repos (sync'ing with Debian Testing). A kernel more than one year old, without any chance to opt to install a more recent one (unless you add debian testing repo's there, which defeats its purpose and is not the most user-friendly experience...) was actually what made me search what the hell is going on and bumping into that blog post.