Most of us understand the appliance mind set and how stable release can cater to it. We put in lot of effort to get ready for stable so that Pioneer Kits could use stable. Some problems though:
- We wanted to provide not only security fixes but also important fixes for stable users. Unfortunately, backports has a restriction that whatever version is available in testing must go into backports. That didn’t allow us to release 19.2.x with only important fixes to users. We really didn’t want to add a repository outside of Debian infrastructure.
- FreedomBox has come a long way since its beginning. However, we think it is still in active development and many of its features are yet to come. In the previous stable cycle the project changed very drastically. Perhaps we will do a better job for the next stable cycle.
We tried to fix this and other important bugs for stable users. There was a problem with release scheduling https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=924523 
Now we are not sure if there is any way to get those changes without backports.