... I have read that once a debian release goes into stable like
etch has you do not see very many updates or new apps just security and
bug fixes mostly.
I know about enabling testing and such but I have done that once and it
broke my machine pretty bad, so I do not wish to go down that road
again.
You are running Debian stable, because you prefer the stable Debian tree. It runs great, there is just one problem: the software is a little bit outdated compared to other distributions. That is where backports come in.
Backports are recompiled packages from testing (mostly) and unstable (in a few cases only, e.g. security updates), so they will run without new libraries (wherever it is possible) on a stable Debian distribution. I recommend you to pick out single backports which fits your needs, and not to use all backports available here.
Manon.