> I really wish people would stop making comments like this.
I didn't mean to imply that Fedora isn't a first-class distribution in its own right. In this post's context, I see why it would look that way, and I apologize for it. I don't mean to belittle the work you folks are doing, and I know that the Fedora project is more than just the distro, and that the distro itself is more than just Red Hat's testbed for new features.
I don't run Fedora on any of my home computers anymore. I ran it up to Core 3, I think, having ran Red Hat Linux before. But I've always "ran into" Fedora computers as part of my work and occasionally ran it on my company-issued laptop at $work. While Red Hat's presence can account for some of your stranger choices, it cannot be the only reason behind your success (and I honestly don't think it is).
The origin of my snarky comment is that to many of us outside the Fedora community, it often feels like a lot of things are finding their way into Fedora largely because they need more ample testing. The fact that they're so active and so pushy means that most of them are from Red Hat. I have very few fond memories about dealing with very early breakage from NetworkManager, PulseAudio, systemd and so on. All of them are now successful technologies, but they were not "ready" by any responsible use of the word when they were first included or enabled by default in Fedora. Wayland is, to some degree, an exception, but only because it has already seen wide enough deployment in the embedded/infotainment area that, for once, the desktop is not the earliest adopter.
This is one of the reasons why I recommended Fedora as a development distribution (my wording probably didn't really look like a recommendation, sorry!). At $work, I already work on Linux software; I don't want to deal with more Linux craziness at home, so I tend to stay way from bleeding edge stuff. But if you do need to keep in touch with what's happening in the Linux world, Fedora is the most stable way of doing it that's also reasonably low-maintenance (the second best option, IMHO, is Gentoo).
Staying up-to-date with all these changes is very important, IMHO. For better or for worse, very important pieces of a modern Linux system, like systemd and GTK, are making a lot of breaking changes in-between releases. Running a bleeding-edge system is about the only reasonable way of becoming "passively" acquainted with them, and is a great way of weeding out the subtle bugs that they introduce.