[HelloImDumb]

You've given one example; SELinux. Did wheezy ship with SELinux enabled? No. So how is that a step backwards? It would have been a step backwards if they shipped with it enabled and it was half-assed. SELinux is notoriously hard to get right across the board. See how many Fedora solutions start with "turn off SELinux." Shipping jessie without SELinux enabled was the right thing to do, if the alternative was: not shipping jessie; or shipping borked jessie with borked SELinux support on by default. Those who know what they are doing can turn it on with all that entails.

You gripe about kernel 3.16 LTS but provide no support for your statement. With a cursory search I can't find any. If it was such a big deal I have to assume I would. For my part I use Jessie on the desktop and server and have not encountered these mysterious kernel problems of which you complain. Again, you may have wished for some reason that they shipped with 3.18 or 4.x, but they shipped. They have 10 official ports and 20K+ packages to deal with, I'm sorry they didn't release with your pet kernel version. Again, those who know what they are doing can upgrade jessie's kernel themselves if they are wedded to the new features.

So, massive steps backwards?