so a common claim I see made is that arch is up to date than Debian but harder to maintain and easier to break. Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?
Debian Stable isn't the only way to run Debian though people often act like it. That said, if you want the stability of Debian Stable then run it with the nix package manager (nix-bin).