Agreed. I used to use so-called "stable" distros for the longest time because that's what our installed software was supported on. But when I couldn't use the latest and greatest development tools (emacs for instance), it became really annoying doing my development. So I switched (from RHEL/CentOS) to Fedora for my day-to-day development. I can't say I've run into any show stopper issues, our software and the supporting software run just fine on it and I'm a happier, more productive developer.