One of the most valuable aspects of Debian was (and hopefully is and will always be) the fact that a release upgrade was always possible and (at least for me) never caused any problems (rtm of course).
The idea of "LTS" is a stupid reversion of something better we already had - the idea that upgrades are always reliable.
Saying "LTS" for me sounds like "we have lost control over the upgrade process."
Of course I must add that updating from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 went ok on all machines I have seen (servers and also desktop workstations) - this should not be surprising, but the expected default, then we do not need no "LTS" theater.
LTS is a guideline about extended support, extended beta cycles, and less potentially breaking changes vs the non-LTS releases. I don't see it as saying much of anything about the upgrade path, but rather that if you do an apt-get update on an existing LTS box, you can expect to not get major version bumps of tools and libraries and thus less breakage. Of course, you don't get the latest and greatest software, but for most server deployments, that's a desired compromise.
And at least I never do an upgrade anyway -- I always do a fresh install from one LTS to the next one on bare metal -- and simply recycle VMs in the cloud.
One of the major issues with current transitions is apache 2.2 to 2.4+ and other such large gaps that unfortunately will require manual configuration changes. There are many such instances of these gaps depending on where you are coming from and going to.
LTS is not about how reliable the upgrade from one version of the distribution to another is. It's about how long security and bug fixes will be provided for a version of the distribution.
An Ubuntu LTS gets updates for 60 months. A non-LTS release gets updates for 9 months.
The idea of "LTS" is a stupid reversion of something better we already had - the idea that upgrades are always reliable.
Saying "LTS" for me sounds like "we have lost control over the upgrade process."
Of course I must add that updating from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 went ok on all machines I have seen (servers and also desktop workstations) - this should not be surprising, but the expected default, then we do not need no "LTS" theater.