I agree with your comments about distros. I think the most important thing is to pick a distro and stick with it. Get good at understanding how it's built and maintained, and ideally start to engage with the community behind it. When a problem arises, you can then fix it, and perhaps upstream the solution. I will never push my choice of distro on others, but if they are interested I will share and support their efforts to use it. (It's not arch, BTW!!!  ;)) 