WTB: Linux Distribution and Community

I am looking for a *n?x distro and community that fits me. I am willing to pay top dollar for this information. Actually, I'm not willing to spend anything, but *ahem* whatever, heh. Bad joke.

I was wondering if folks who have been active in their *n?x distro/community for a long time would be willing to share some thoughts on it, to better help me decide both what I'm looking for exactly and what's out there. Some example information I'd be interested in includes:

• Distro
  • Age
  • Licenses Uses
  • Target "Market"
  • Package Management (e.g. Binary/Source, Dependency Resolution/No, ./configure && make && make install)
• Community
  • Types of Community Interaction (e.g. web forums, chat, mailing lists)
  • Community Attitudes (e.g. Mega-Ego!, NSFW, Family Friendly)
  • Administrative Policies (e.g. overbearing, professional, relaxed, free-for-all)

I'm somewhat familiar with the FreeBSD, Slackware, and Ubuntu distros and their communities and am looking at other distros mainly. Recommendations of large and small distros alike are welcome.

These are a few of my favorite distros and forums/communities:

Slackware - Linux Questions
Crunchbang - http://crunchbang.org/forums/
Gentoo - http://forums.gentoo.org/index.php

There are others that I am a member of, but I either don't use the distros any more, and therefore don't need to use those forums, or I just don't particularly like them. I don't use Crunchbang any more, but I do like the forum, so I continue to go back there from time to time.

The Debian forum is good, but I don't use it any more. I find many of the Debian-based newbie distro forums to be somewhat *ahem* lacking in good, knowledgeable technical info (not naming any names). Seems to be a lot of "How do I change my wallpaper?" and "This theme is yucky, how do I change it?" and "What button do I push to make <whatever> right?"

Describing all the distros is a tall order: I've only tried 107 myself. Some of the best ones in my opinion are
CentOS for stability and configurability; there'll be work involved in tracking extra software and the forum is geared to computer professionals. Stick to Gnome or KDE.
Mepis as one of the most friendly and stable derivatives of Debian, if you like KDE.
Mint as the best home-user's distro in the Debian family, if you like Mate or Cinnamon.
PCLinuxOS for rolling-release that doesn't break and a great community. Stick to KDE, though.
SalineOS is like Mepis, but for Xfce fans.
Salix, offering Slackware with lots more software and configuration tools, and a good choice of well-implemented GUIs.

Really, it's better if you describe your ideal and then we can say what we think fits, naturally with a total lack of consensus!

................................

After some research on my own, I think I'll be trying out Debian, CentOS, and the Cinnamon version of Mint to see if any of those hit the nail on the head.

I don't know that they're what I'm looking for, but I'll also give OpenSUSE and Fedora a shot if none of those seem to hit the spot. All else fails, I'll try out the GNOME version of Ubuntu and start digging a little deeper into smaller distros.