I can find faults in any of them, but mostly hate working with Redhat/CentOS/Fedora. Strongly prefer Debian over Ubuntu, and I strongly prefer Gentoo over Arch. SUSE is an unknown, not sure about that one.
In highschool, I got a desktop from a yard sale (Pentium I) and got an HDD from goodwill, all for $10, just to install FreeBSD. It was awesome. I think I still have the desktop somewhere in storage.
If you don't mind me asking, what's the issue with Fedora? It doesn't have really old packages like RedHat or CentOS. And things are voted on by the community (yes RedHat has made proposals, but a lot of them fail).
I mostly agree with you, on RHEL and CentOS tho and on Debian.
From memory it has a different layout in /etc, /use, and /opt that kept tripping me up. Simple things seemed harder. I do a fair amount in older versions of Java that caused problems. It's been a while though, so things have likely changed.
Oh yeah, I somehow blocked that from my memory. I ran into that too. Iirc they mostly fixed it but I think Java is still different, which is weird to be honest.
I have a bit of a fear of SLES, purely due to Puredisk using them as their base back in the day (before they were swallowed by Symantec/Veritas/Broadcom/whatever). The amount of time I spent in YaST2 and losing data, again and again, made me genuinely never want to investigate any issues.