Linux woes

I've started to become unsatisfied with my Linux desktop again. So this time I really thought about it. And I came up with this matrix. I compare some of the distros I'd consider using, and features I look for in my desktop. The first distro I'm going to try is Ubuntu. It seems the most polished, even though its pretty patched. I'm looking for a distro that will allow me to focus less on packages, and making packages. I want to try to start focusing more on actual application development, rather than distribution development. Hence why I'm considering Debian. Ubuntu seems to be a more polished, GNOME-ified Debian distribution. Gentoo, Slackware and Fedora are 99% out of the question. Gentoo is too tough to maintain. Too much compiling, etc-updating, and such. Slackware has no real package manager, and entirely too much hand-editing of config files. And Fedora, is well, so kludgy its not usable.
And so we're down to three: Arch Linux (my tried and true buddy), Ubuntu and Debian. My problems with Arch Linux are: no enough packages. I find myself making packages for many applications that have been around for a while. I know that I if I stick it out, I can help add to the package count, but, as I said earlier, I want to transition away from distro development and move more towards application development. And second, with Arch Linux, I find myself doing a lot of hand-editing of config files. And I'm growing tired of paying that much attention to my OS. I want things to work a bit more automated. And so I am trying Ubuntu. Next I'll try Debian (in a few weeks) and see where I stand from there. I may go back to Arch Linux, and I may not. Not that my blog gets syndicated on any planets anyway, so none of those users will know. And this is it for me supporting distros. I'm too much of a flipflop (thank you George); I keep changing distributions. So we'll see how Ubuntu goes. Cheers.