Certainly not everyone. Personally, I pay little attention to that sort of thing at all. I don't care if it's a "dead" project or not -- as long as the software is meeting my needs, that's the only thing that matters. If/when it stops doing that, then I'll look for alternatives.
Same here. I run Slackware on all of my engineering and development workstations. It does what I want, nothing gets hosed when running updates, and I don't feel like my main job is sysadmin.
But I keep getting told I need a "Slackware intervention" :P