But OpenBSD does it on a six month basis. I am wondering if it is more the degree of organization and planning rather than the size of the project.
Debian does too much. That is the issue if you ask me.
Both have their place, but for general-purpose servers, I find Debian to be a much more productive system on top of which to build solutions. For firewalls, embedded storage devices, or load balancers, on the other hand, I still reach for a recent OpenBSD install disk, because the smaller footprint and security hardening have real advantages for systems running such a limited set of services.