Gentoo of course
sure, you need to know a bit more and put some more work in up front, but honestly the payback is tenfold. I have been in situations with Fedora where you just get into rpm dependency hell with no easy way out. Also I found distributions based on the same sets of tools tend to override your settings, typically have stupid defaults or I spend my time finding where they set up things.
I also refuse to do "big upgrades". With gentoo I have very granular control, upgrade in small increments, or downgrade as I please. This control can have its downsides as well, but if you really know how linux works, you'll be fine, and even if you don't, you'll soon learn
I've really never looked back.
This guy has been
blogging a little on the stupidness of some distros package managers. See the two part post on Debian and How Bad Tools Can Make Easy Things Very Hard. Yeah, I know, a gentoo view of the world, but still, worth consideration.
(ex-Solaris geek, the world has mostly moved on lol)