Most of the cases, those software are from Ubuntu repositories.. would Pop!_OS consider building their own, or as some other people mentioned, rebase on something else?
Mint is based on LTS and they release two versions a year and update their package base. I respect what the pop_os guys are doing, which I guess includes you, we need more modern DE's besides gnome and KDE. I know what LTS is, it's just odd that you guys haven't updated pop_os for over a year, and the last time I used an OS that did the same thing, Solus, the whole project went to shit. I'm on endeavourOS now, but I've been keeping an eye on the progress of cosmic hoping to see an updated version of pop because I genuinely love the style and look of the OS. If you're updating packages and keeping up to date on as many packages as possible then I definitely retract my original post.