Personally, I've always been dubious about 'the stages'.
When you speak to other carers or read what they have written on TP you find that often people have a cluster of symptoms which might well include a few from each 'stage'. If you raise this with a 'true believer' in the stages, they will tell you that you should only view the stages as a rough guide.
It's actually very, very rough. It seems to take no account of the fact that there are so many different kinds of dementia - possibly as many as there are people with dementia.
And I worry that if a carer is led to believe that the person cared for is, for example, in the 'late stages', they will treat them accordingly and this may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A carer recently reported on TP that when she asked a medic what stage her mum had reached he told her that they didn't do stages anymore 'because everyone's different'. So it may be that a rethink is underway.
Perhaps the message is finally getting through. Instead of consulting the stages, carers could usefully focus on what the PWD can and can't do then look for ways of compensating for the things they can't do and helping them to maintain the abilities they still have.
I'm fascinated to see that there are a number of different versions of the stages floating about. And that they all seem to be based around odd numbers - 3 stages, 5 stages, 7 stages, never, you notice, around even numbers. It reminds me of the magical numbers of myths and fairy stories.