tried it but I quite like how mint looks so I tried it with cinnamon and god default cinnamon is ugly and I dunno how to get all the mint theming so that was a deal breaker for me
Apparently you didnt read about the update process.
What you do in debian is simply beautiful:
You rock stable and once a newer package is required, you install from backports.
When a the package goes to a next stable version, you can remove the backports. It will transition automagically.