There were several comments to "Fedora and the repository politics" suggesting Ubuntu. Several of my friends and colleagues whom I respect a lot have suggested Ubuntu before that. This makes for temptation, but probably not one I'll succumb to just yet. It was also people I respect very much who suggested Debian, and there's no doubt that even though you may share a lot of technical tendencies with someone, you won't always share experiences with particular distributions. If Fedora Core ever becomes unbearable, Ubuntu will be my next stop, but as it is, I really like Fedora, and I'm very productive on it, largely because I know my way around it so well. I did complain about the repository split, but once I get over the switch to RPMForge setup, all usually goes well after that. There's not really enough pain to justify learning an entirely new distro right now.
I am very glad to hear that Ubuntu addresses a lot of the problems with Debian. It's good to have another viable choice.