You’re right, the stable channel right now includes only the v11 (aka Summer 2015) releases (both of DM and sims code). I think @danielsf has been publishing more recent versions onto dev, though they may behave inconsistently in updates due to recent changes to how versions are computed. I think you should be safe, as long as you always do conda update conda update lsst-sims (as it’s never been tagged, I use a different algorithm to compute its version so it remained unaffected).
PS: I 100% agree it’d be good to have one, canonical, place with install instructions.