My comment was more the fact that Debian has enough excess resources to support the Beaglebone Black. So, categorizing Debian as having barely enough developers to support itself is disingenuous.

Nonetheless, Red Hat really is doing a lot of upstream development, certainly more than Debian does as far as I know. Indeed, the Debian community has managed to keep their release schedule and meet their goals lately, so they're probably in a better shape than "barely enough to support itself", but there hardly seems to be room for comparison between the two.