Imagine how much less would get done overall and how many fewer people would participate if we did not let people work on what they wanted to work on.
The only choice left would be to contribute or not and more people would choose not to contribute (probably the choice you have made).
I like the idea of a stable distro as the host OS and Distrobox with Arch and the AUR for applications.
For most of my machines, I do not need the latest kernel or even the latest desktop environment. But it is a pain to have out of date desktop apps and especially dev tools.
I think this strikes a nice balance.