To be fair, they've been conditioned to act that way given 90% of the packages in devel are stable and have been for a long time. Unfortunately the resolution to this, while obvious, hasn't seemed to have occured. I vote for two resolutions:

1. Bring in a package manager to test and push stable applications to testing.

OR

2. Upload a virus to devel and teach em a lesson

Anywho...

Out of curiousity, the devel version the same one you've got on your depot? I've been meaning to reinstall it to keep trying things out but stuck on 2G net for a couple days.