Beyond none of its branches actually satisfying my preferences, I feel like the way it handles major version upgrades is way too involved. I suppose it makes sense; it's paying back the accumulated debt of a couple years worth of bliss...

Having said that, my experience on Fedora Atomic is (almost) equally blissful without requiring any of that whenever a major version update strikes.

Don't get me wrong; I definitely do believe Debian has its uses on desktop Linux. But I can't shake off the feeling that they're definitely more niche compared to say Fedora.