I haven't used plain Fedora much, but Aurora just 'feels' more coherent, polished and stable than other distro's I have used in recent years. I tend to notice bugs/rough edges in all of them, but Aurora somehow just works. Having a strictly fixed core allows it to be fine-tuned better, I guess? Or perhaps it's just in my head. :-)

All non-core software is provided by Flathub (through the Discover app) and Brew (for cli apps). Both have worked flawlessly for me as well.