I'm more devops than sysadmin, so more expertise may have changed my experience, but when I did run a CentOS server, I thought, "yay, this is great"... until it came time to actually update.

Then, I realized that I had simply been accumulating up all of my upgrade pain as debt - with compound interest.

By comparison, upgrading Debian servers from version to version felt like hopping from bed to bed in a mattress store. Aside from a missed footing or two, it was usually a nice soft landing.