With the backports repository enabled, I get to use more recent versions of the software, if it’s needed. Most of the time, just the 4 main ones are enough.

There’s a couple of ways around this. If your package is available in Backports, you can install the individual .deb from there. If they don’t have what you need, you can request a backport, but if its not a popular package or overly complex it might not be accepted — or at least take a long time.

Once you’re familiar with the Backports project, you’ll probably want to add the repository to your system. I highly recommend the “pinning” feature described in this document so you select only the backports you need; your best bet is to stick to the original Hardy packages for the ones which you don’t need a more recent version.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=268687

I was in a situation where packages I wanted (tcl, tk, amsn) weren’t available in backports, so I used the above post to make my own. It took a while for me to figure it out, download the build environment, and test the results. It worked surprisingly slick and was a fun project. Definitely YMMV, and I’d imagine that there are a lot of packages this method won’t work properly for.