This is highly relevant to why Qubes isn’t considered user-friendly.
Upgrading Debian templates is a big slog for me–I’m sure Joe the journalist (or Josephina) will not find the prospect --or, more likely, surprise-- of needing to upgrade all their Fedora templates twice a year pleasant.
I think @deeplow’s solution of an in-place upgrade would make it far less user-unfriendly (assuming it could be done while assuring users it hasn’t broken things–security things), but ultimately switching to Debian as default would be better.
Speaking of journalists–how is SecureDrop doing? Does it need frequent template upgrades?