I'm a happy FC1 user... I'm certainly biased towards RH and FC because it is all I've used since RH4.2 replaced my Slackware 3.6 install. I've come to live with the limitations and niceties that RH's distros have. It reminded me of all the reasons I left Slackware behind. I'm also very encouraged by the speed at which FC is moving. Hopefully FC3 will include Gnome 2.8 and Evo 2. Both look like really good steps forward for Gnome (my preferred "Desktop"). Hopefully there will also be more "community" involvement in the Fedora Project soon too. Though FC is also not a distro to run on a server. If you want a reliable commercially supported server distro then RHEL is very good but expensive. If you're a "who cares about commercial support" kinda guy then Debian is the flavour you should use on your server. Though Debian "Stable" certainly lags somewhat behind in application versions. Which in the OSS world can be bad (unless people backport patches). Eg, the version of OpenLDAP on RH9 is no longer supported by OpenLDAP.org. If you find a bug or whatever you've gotta upgrade. This may effect Debian "stable" even more due to its age. I was rather put off Debian last time I tried it due to its lack of polish at the install phase. I'm lazy, I want the computer to do work for me, not the other way around.
A large reason people that moved away from Red Hat to Debian on their servers is that Red Hat didn't have an automatic way of downloading and installing packages, and Debian did (apt-get). Now, Red Hat (in the form of the Fedora Project) has yum, apt-get and up2date to choose from, it's not really a problem any more. Also, there is more software packaged for Debian (11,000 packages or so) but for the ones that you regularly need, they're all available in 3rd parties repositories for Fedora.
From my estimates of your experience, I think you couldn't go past Fedora Core. FC3 is also coming out in a couple of months time.
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