I've been burned a couple times too many on Ubuntu's regressions. They'll ship a newer version of a package that breaks some use case which isn't super common but not super obscure either, and then I have to figure out what broke. I've stopped trusting Ubuntu's packages so I don't use Mint either even though I like the distro.
Debian continues to impress me with its stability. I run the testing branch at home and breakage is still extremely rare. Yes, there's things that Debian makes harder to set up, and running Debian means you basically resign yourself to running a userspace that's 1+ year old, but the overall experience just works better in my experience.
Maybe I should give Fedora a serious try one day. I haven't properly used any Red Hat based desktop since Mandrake but I did like CentOS a lot for servers.
Have been using Debian as my daily driver for 5+ years on both desktops and laptops. No issues at all though I did spend some time on gnome shell to get it closer to what I prefer (multiple desktops, alt-tab behaviour, etc)
The installation process, that I have to run when a local disk eventually fails is insignificant compared to constantly fixing shit. (And yes, it's not a nice process - even worse because every time I run it, it changed.)
I don't care about FOSS, so the principles are not a motivation for me.