Here was a quote from Clem on why Cinnamon 1.6 is still in the romeo repos for Maya:
If we recommended it to everybody it wouldn’t hit Romeo, it would overwrite Cinnamon 1.4. Version 1.6 is brand new, it’s yet to pass community feedback, to receive translations for every language out there and to gain the maturity that’s required to properly get in Linux Mint (in particular, it will take a little while before most of the themes are ported to Cinnamon 1.6).
This was posted sometime in September. However, at this point Cinnamon 1.6 is 2 months old (which is a good amount of time considering the whole project's been around for less than a year). It also has received a lot of testing in Mint 14. It is now considered good enough to be included in the Cinnamon edition of the newest Mint release. I think that now that themes have been ported - there are many nice themes for Cinnamon 1.6 in the cinnamon-themes package in Mint 14. My guess is that Cinnamon will be brought into the main repo shortly. The Mint Team does have a lot of stuff on their hands right now - Mint 14 Cinnamon/MATE being released very recently, Mint 14 KDE and Xfce upcoming, as well as LMDE UP 6 entering incoming soon.
Another option is to add the cinnamon-stable ppa (
https://launchpad.net/~gwendal-lebihan-dev/+archive/cinnamon-stable), and then to force the package version in synaptic - this will get you Cinnamon 1.6.7 for precise/maya. From my experience, Cinnamon 1.6 is very stable on Maya.
Dell XPS 15 l502x - Debian Testing 64-bit NetInst Xfce, SolydX 64-bit Debian Testing, SolydK 64-bit SolydXK Testing
Old Gateway Pentium 4 Desktop - Arch Linux 64-bit Xfce and SolydX 32-bit Sid