Why fedora is a tinkerers' distro?
 

I have been using it for a while but I'm not able to see its called a tinkerers distro so often. Am I missing something?

It is not really a tinkerer distro, it is more a developer distro, since it is the testbed of Red Hat for their Enterprise distros and also a cutting edge distro with short release cycle (and a very short support cycle), which is beneficial for developers.

I do call it that .But. currently it is a bit more stable that it was back in the fedora 5 and 8 days
however
sometimes a update WILL royally mess something up , it happens .

It also happens with EVERY distro ,however fedora is a FAST development distro . that dose cause it to be MORE susceptible to this problem.
One needs to be able to fix that when it happens

Some do consider fedora to be perpetually BETA, because there are more unfixed bugs .( related to the "newest of the new")

all in all fedora is a good choice IF one LIKES to dig into the code and fix the broken things that DO show up from time to time .
Fedora WILL break more often than other distros

Now bugs aside Fedora very often uses the "newest of the new" -- some examples
-- libpng12 VS libpng14 ---
gcc 4.3 VS gcc 4.5 & 4.6
first to use KDE4 and now Gnome3

having the NEWEST gcc installed WILL require some minor to major hacking on your part to build MOST programs from source

do a bit of research
fedora included gcc 4.1 then gcc4.3 when 99% of programs would NOT build with out some hacking .

it is not a Point and click OS