This is all very interesting. I do feel that I have not made it totally clear about what I want though. I do not want a bleeding edge system I want a stable basic system but I have yet to find a new distro which while acknowledging this still provides for updating some products to their later levels (note stable not testing or beta) because these new version provide functionality or security fixes I want/need. Mandriva has been the closest to what I need when you include the MIB repository, however I'm not happy Mandriva is going in the right direction and maybe wont even survive.
There are people in the new Mageia community who seem to think that I should not need to update at all between releases apart from what they decree as fixes, so I'm unlikely to see any updates to kdenlive, openshot, digikam (when v2 comes out of beta) - they are even tardy about Firefox updates in the release. Mageia is even missing a package for openshot full functionality although it will run.
So far I may try PCLinuxOS again or maybe Debian.
While I am quite happy to get my hands dirty I dont really see why I should have to in order to get what I consider application to update, I really do feel that these application developers should consider more carefully how their packages interact with the main Linux system.
Stuart