I've been using Gentoo as my primary OS since 2007, along with gnome2 (now mate) as the desktop environment with the ancient compiz for fancy effects like wobbling windows and a desktop cube. Updates come pretty quickly. It's so nice having rolling releases, dist upgrades for other distros make me nervous and I've lost time to them -- and occasionally other software that certain distros decided to throw you into a curses terminal UI for configuration (or just mysteriously break and fail to install the package if you were using the desktop GUI). The custom patches thing is really nice and fairly straightforward. When you install a package its tarball gets saved in /var/cache/distfiles/ so you can just extract your package with the right version to a temp dir to work on. If you want to patch the package foo/bar you create a diff file /etc/portage/patches/foo/bar/patch-name (git format-patch can help, you just take the diff --git parts) and it gets auto-applied next time you build the package (or if it can't apply the diff, fails and tells you). I don't use this as often as I could, I only have a few patches at the moment (https://github.com/Jach/patches -- there's been a couple minor updates I should push), but it's pretty convenient to fix minor annoyances, take tiny fixes from upstream until they're fully released, or add custom features/text where you want.

With overlays to get packages outside of the core distro tree, a lot of software is just available, and even when it's not, you usually have the build tools or can easily install them so building whatever else from source isn't an obstacle. (I do sometimes have to use debian/ubuntu/mint (mint is on my travel laptop that I only use when traveling) and it still gets me sometimes having to make sure build-essential and various -dev packages are installed to do anything.) One downside is that your glibc will likely be newer than a lot of other systems out there, so that creates obstacles to shipping binaries around. You can also create your own packages in an overlay fairly easily as well, or keep some old ones around that have lost their maintainers and get removed from the tree.

There's also a somewhat annoying 'license' system (adding license names you accept to a configuration file) but with it the tooling can automatically fetch certain things for downloading (e.g. nvidia driver blobs) that some companies want people to get manually so they can harvest your data/force you to accept some EULA. I'm now remembering that 16 or 17 years ago, the last time I tried Fedora, I was testing it out by plugging in a flash drive (yay it auto mounted) but it failed to play an MP3 file and suggested I pay someone money to install codecs. It's left a sour impression on Fedora ever since, not to mention my lingering question why anyone would want a Red Hat derivative outside of a locked down office (and even then at my old BigCo job we devs got to use Ubuntu).

For casual use I still think Mint is probably the best distro at the moment. I tend to recommend the mate desktop environment since it's what I like and am used to but it's a poor distro if you can't easily install any DE of choice on it.

Interestingly, I had the opposite experience.

With Ubuntu I kept running into bugs which had already been fixed upstream, or which were caused either by Debian's or Ubuntu's patches. And even filing regular bug reports was basically impossible: the Ubuntu packagers will almost certainly ignore it, the Debian packagers aren't interested in bugs happening in mutated versions of outdated packages in their unstable repo, and the upstream maintainers aren't interested in bug reports for weirdly-patched old releases.

After several attempts at getting bugs fixed (sometimes even sending complete patches) and getting no response for years I gave up on Ubuntu and switched to Fedora. Their policy is to ship the freshest upstream releases possible, with as few patches as possible. This means I can just directly file my bug reports at the upstream vendor, and a fix will usually land on my system fairly quickly.

I do notice that I am slowly using more and more Flatpak desktop apps: why bother with the middleman when you can trivially get the latest release directly from the upstream vendor?

I've been using the latest Fedora full-time for over two years without issue, and have been doing nearly all my gaming on it as well. The only gaming that doesn't work are games that deliberately use anti-cheat that doesn't support anything but Windows (typically the games run great in single player or offline, but multiplayer refuses to work). Of my Steam catalog, over 90% just works, and a large amount of that now has native Linux support thanks to the Steam Deck.

What particular issues were you experiencing?

As a counter anecdote, on my Windows installation I routinely run into "WTF" moments, such as BitLocker randomly deciding I need to enter recovery codes, the constant nagware that is OneDrive and friends, plus when I search for the same binary exe I've launched a dozen times Windows still displays "web results" first - fooling me just about every time.