Hi,
Basically it comes down to me having had more success with other distributions than with RedHat, learn't Slakware, liked it, debian nice, but not yet ready for me, currently run SuSE.
e-smith 3.1 has been my first good experience with RedHat, and am also not mad about the SYSV startup scripts ir uses, I favour the BSD style of Slackware more.
As always in these matters, it is a personal thing.
Enjoy your Linux, whichever distro you use.
Russell