Hi Kevin,
On the other hand, I strongly favor sticking with a distribution's package rather than starting every day with a "git pull". So, I'm always slightly behind the latest and greatest.
Just for the record: Your description omits the (actually quite convenient) middle between the two extremes: Namely, that it's quite easy to keep up with current LilyPond development by downloading and using the respective (unstable) builds that are released every few weeks to months.
Distribution packages often are lagging behind quite a bit, while doing "git pull" (and self-compiling) is much more complicated to set up.
The naming of the development releases as "unstable" is a bit misleading: They are unstable more in the sense that features might change back and forth (which sometimes, but not often, happens), not that they are much more likely to burn your computer than the "stable" releases. Actually, the quite rigorous testing standard we have for merging code contributions by developers goes a long way to ensure that even the daily current master (the one from git pull and self-compiling) is usually perfectly fine for everyday production use.
Lukas
