Aside: for my own self respect, I want to make some sort of disclaimer here (with maybe several points): I'm sure that sometimes I post things that do any of (1) make other people cringe (for one reason or another), (2) make me look uninformed (or worse), and (3) other causes for embarrassment (to myself of others).
I finally realized that the "normal" progression / hierarchy of the Debian releases is from Unstable to Testing to Stable. I never looked it up -- I assume that, like most people, we don't look up everything but make assumptions based on past experience. I expected that the normal progression for Debian releases would be from Testing (trying all / any kind of new, possibly weird things), to Unstable (concentrating on things that survived some initial testing and now maybe being released to a select group for some real pounding en route to Stable. (I've never used anything other than stable releases, so my misunderstanding hasn't had any real world effect on my systems, but I have been confused at times, and suspect that maybe one other person out there may have similarly been confused.)
