If you think Debian unstable fares better on the stability and security metrics than most commercial distributions, why are you simultaneously criticizing testing for being out of date? Why not just use unstable, if you think that's sufficient?
Because testing is more stable :) And I sleep really well at night running Debian/testing on my servers.
I don't know what you mean by "Java's at 1.1". There are many Java implementations about, and most of them aren't free enough to distribute. Which Java version are you referring to here?
You don't have to distribute the Java bins to have an install for Java under Debian. Just use a realplayer style wrapper. -Mark