Background considerations, question follows:
When I was studying as a doctor (a loooong time ago) my Pharmacology
professor told us:
"A good doctor is never the first to use a new medicine and never the
last to abandon an old one"
and later on my sailplane instructor told me:
"There are old pilots and bold pilots but NO old bold pilots"
While I love using sid because of the very current releases and I am
willing to take the risk of having to debug "some" problems, being the
system I WORK with the only I have, getting fundamental things wrong can
seriously impact my job.
Just as an example, in the moment I write, synaptic tells me I could
upgrade LVM2, login, and HAL. If these bomb I would be in trouble. If
xpdf bombed it would be a little annoying but nothing more.
One solution for the "fundamental packages" (please do not call me
coward but only cautious) would be, (like the medicine example on top)
to wait a little time (say one week ten days) before installing any new
packages and before that checking if/which serious bugs have been reported.