I'm not familiar with Rawhide so can't comment on that.
> Debian Unstable (also known by its codename "Sid") is not a release, but rather the development version of the Debian distribution containing the latest packages that have been introduced into Debian.
It's worth it reading the FAQ [0] before hopping on either, but as someone who's been running a mixed testing/unstable system for years, there's no reason for panic.
What I would love to see in the Debian ecosystem is a "Slowroll" release, similar to OpenSuse's upcoming "Slowroll" option. Maybe take Sid and make include any Sid packages that have been in it and stable for at least 2 weeks, and release an update every 30 days or so. Do some additional testing, backport any critical security fixes... sounds like a lot of work but it would be a valuable option.
That is mostly what testing does, modulo the exact numbers/durations involved.
One reason people don't do snapshot-releases of testing is that such releases wouldn't get security support. And security support shouldn't wait 30 days.
Which is why I explicitly mentioned security stuff being backported. Maybe it wasn't clear enough, but yes, I agree that security updates need to be released faster in many cases, and need a special handeling. The amount of work involved in handeling security patches is probably why it hasn't happened yet.
Wouldn't necessarily compare Sid to Rawhide, since for example, the Nvidia drivers on Sid are still on 535, while 550 has been released and is actually very good. Rawhide is almost analogous to Gentoo's unstable releases where whatever you are getting is probably being pulled directly from the source rather than a discrete release.
Whatever the Debian team calls their releases, you can pretty much slide it back a spot or two within the chain of release freshness relative to most other distros. It's almost impossible to accurately compare the totality of packages between distros and make any reasonable conclusion, but it's pretty safe to say that with the snapshot of limited software I have looked at that is reasonably meant to be updated such as userspace graphics libraries, Debian's stance on an unstable or testing distro does not align with the colloquial definition of such a thing.
Debian testing or sid are more or less that. Barring major upgrades (Plasma 6 is taking some time), most packages are kept quite up-to-date.