Moving from Gentoo to ... SUSE, Ubuntu, or Fedora Core?

I seem to be able to go 3-4 years with a Linux distribution before I get bored of it and switch to something else. I have that feeling coming along again, so I thought I'd write up how it goes. So you'll know where I'm coming from, here is a brief history of Linux distributions I've run:

I started with Slackware around Linux 1.0 (1994-ish), since it was about the only real distribution available at the time. I installed it off of floppies that I downloaded from the Unix lab at school.
I moved on to RedHat around version 3.0.x (1996-ish) since I wanted to try that fancy new RPM thing that was supposed to make things so much easier.
I switched to SuSE Linux 6.x (somewhere around 1998-2000). As I recall, I had dial-up at the time, and it was what was available at BestBuy.
I gave up SuSE when they (along with almost every other major distributions at the time) decided to go commercial-only and either not provide a freely-downloadable version, or to only provide a limited "evaluation" version for free. Also, their "update" system at the time was horrendously slow (lack of mirrors?).
I ran my own Linux From Scratch-derived distribution for several years (2003-2004 or so). My thinking was that a source-based distribution was the way to go to escape "RPM dependency hell" (where packages won't play nicely because they were built on systems with incompatible headers/libraries.)
After a while, I got tired of having to create my own patches (and discovering that you can't find clean patches for bug/security fixes for glibc!) and switched to Gentoo. This still let me get away from binary packages, while not having to maintain my own patchset.
Unfortunately, I discovered that in getting away from RPM dependency problems, I had found some new troubles with Gentoo: "Stable" sources that wouldn't compile, and sources that would compile but would throw mysterious runtime exceptions that could only be fixed by recompiling the entire system. (My Gentoo system is currently in a "non-upgradable" state due to a non-compiling package ...)

So ... I think I'm going to switch back to a binary distribution. I'm going to evaluate candidates based on a set of criteria for (my idea of) a "fully loaded" configuration. Here are my requirements, in no particular order:

NVIDIA OpenGL drivers
Detects "high memory" (1Gb+) and my video capture card (DC10+) with its standard kernel (no compiling necessary).
DVD playback (all retail discs)
Java, Flash, Acrobat Reader, RealPlayer (including Firefox plugins)
Streaming audio & video support.
Microsoft (TrueType) corefonts
The ability to talk to my Canon S3 IS camera (uses the USB PTP protocol that isn't widely supported under Linux yet).
Be able to run the Wings3d modeler
Be able to run jEdit
Python with lots of modules
The ability to open .DOC, .XLS, .PPT files.

Instead of trying all 3000 distributions, I decided to start with the (supposed) best-of-breed, unscientifically chosen by looking at the current Top 3 on Distrowatch. As of today, those are: Ubuntu 6.06 (I used Kubuntu), openSUSE 10.1, and Fedora Core 5.

I'm going into this expecting a lot: It was OK to have to do a lot of manual configuration with Gentoo, since that was the whole idea. However, I expect these "Top 3" distributions to do all the work for me. I expect them to be as point-and-click easy as possible, and will note anything that strays from that expectation.

By the way, I should mention that I'm using a KDE desktop for all installations here instead of GNOME. I ran dual-desktops for a while during testing, but never noticed enough of a difference for it to matter in the end results. If you prefer GNOME, these notes should apply equally as well to you, with maybe a few tweaks.

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