As I grew more comfortable with Unix fundamentals and I learned more about the GNU/Linux desktop userland, I left openSUSE behind because I didn't care so much about the GUI configuration tools like YaST. I bounced between Gentoo, Ubuntu, Arch, and more obscure derivatives of each, experimenting and learning a lot about the 'bones' of a Linux distro: the init system, the display server, the initramfs tooling, the filesystem, etc. I became especially fascinated with the 'bones' that truly make a class of distros unique: the package manager and the developer tooling used by maintainers to build the distro.
At some point I revisited openSUSE and realized that underneath the more 'superficial' things— important things, but things that are visible from the get-go— I'd loved about the distro as a newcomer were some truly impressive 'bones'. I can back to find that zypper was the most powerful, ergonomic package manager (of its type) that I'd ever seen. I was blown away by the flexibility and diligence of the Open Build Service infrastructure and how easy it made it for me to maintain repositories for nearly any distro, and grateful for the generosity of the openSUSE org for letting basically anyone make an account and leverage that sophisticated build infrastructure for free. The fact that they even automated QA for pre-boot stuff using screen scrapers and QEMU left a lasting impression on me.
Some years after that reintroduction, I fell in love with NixOS, which is now my daily driver everywhere. But I still have a lot of respect and affection for openSUSE.
I hope this change helps drive openSUSE forward over the long term. openSUSE is a great operating system that I'd recommend to anyone looking for a traditional distro that's pleasant to use and easy to maintain. openSUSE seems extremely underrated, at least here in the US.
And everyone should check out the Open Build Service. You know how on GitHub, you can browse to any repo and click the 'Fork' button to get your own copy that you can hack on and publish? OBS gives you that for Linux packages. You can automatically put together a repo full of packages that track whatever upstream source you like, but build with your own custom patches, build for your CPU architecture, etc. You can even fork a package from a different distro (or different release of your own distro), have it build against whatever you're running, and then get dumped neatly into a repo for you. (All builds happen in clean slate VMs, so you are very unlikely to miss any dependencies.)