It's surely too late for your project, but: I was a committed Debian user for ~10 years (I even have the shirt from staffing a booth at a conference!), tried out Arch Linux, and have been delighted and am even a cautious evangelist for it. With Arch you still get the binary packages and huge coverage of Debian's packaging system but the tools are super simple and super fast. I hadn't realized how much time I spent waiting for dpkg until I had a system that didn't use it.