This. And “But 16.04 LTS is rock solid.”
The statement “with LTS you are stuck with older software” sounds scary and very… Debian. With Debian stable (Jessie) you currently have MATE desktop 1.8.1. Now that is old. And you are stuck with it until next stable release.
With Debian you get some updated software via backports, but it’s a very limited set. Ubuntu based distros, on the other hand, have the wonderful PPA system that allows you to get newer apps on top of your solid, LTS base.
I run 16.04.2 LTS for stability and because I need to get work done (stopped using Windows in 2003). I have MATE 1.16.1 and LibreOffice 5.3.1.2 from the PPAs, browsers and their plugins + add-ons are up-to-date. Sublime Text, my preferred code editor, was installed using a tarball downloaded from their site. The app prompts when new version is available and it takes a minute to download new tarball, extract and be done with the update.
Little helper scripts (like youtube-dl) I update straight from their repos with an automated script handled by cron. I cannot name one piece of software in my system that I feel is outdated.
I do install betas and short support releases on a spare machine to take a look at what’s going on with them. So far I haven’t felt like I’ve been deprived of something by sticking with the LTS version.