Armbian is a build system first, cheap ARM hardware enabling second, OS 3rd. We construct user land from Ubuntu and Debian packages since early days, could be said from the day 0. We always provided both because of things as such - bugs and to not deal with user land - let user choose what he needs / prefers. We - those few people - that are investing our resources into common software development, can't afford to fix (all) bugs that showed up. That is not possible by greater Debian community or open source community software in general. Certainly not by corporate Linux flushed with resources such as Cannonical, RedHat, ... even they could do a lot more.
We are using carefully selected packages. Cancer, which you are afraid from, is removed in the process - but surely it could return for short time.
My x86 workstation is running Linux Mint, which is also assembled from Ubuntu packages, using their repositories. My personal and also very much Armbian philosophy is - get from Ubuntu what is good / was improved, leave everything else and make a new, better OS. In our case, this is even more extreme, since most of the hardware we deal with, doesn't even boot Ubuntu and we maintain our own kernels. The most expensive part of the OS.
Maintenance responsibility and costs. We are trying to keep things minimal (we only need one image with latest kernel, user land is less of importance) & manageable, low entropy ... and IHMO we are already failing. I work 6-10h on this project every day and there is not much to notice. Contrary. It looks like we are not doing anything, not answering on bugs, not answering on problems, not porting hardware, I don't answer on personal request ... People, everyday Linux user, usually have absolutely no clue whatsoever how much work is needed to fix a bug, to develop this and that feature, enable some hardware ... to keep a project as ours operational, that moves on.
