I am asking, because Debian is a community project and in the end it gives what its community members are putting in. I am wondering about the amount of effort necessary.
It seems that they estimate it at one person, full time [1]. Which does not seem a lot, given the number of organizations that use Debian.
We were also faced with a very large new infrastructure build and we knew we were at the end of the line with Squeeze but Wheezy had't quite yet shipped, which put us in an awkward position.
Debian is a great distribution, but at the time we felt like Ubuntu was the right way to go given the existing support policies.