Adding a vote for regular old Debian. My strategy is to run Debian testing, and then 6 months or so after it's promoted to stable, switch back to the new testing branch. This way I get a reasonably stable experience (Debian's view of "testing" is at least as stable as many other distros' view of "stable"), avoid the large churn in testing right after a new stable series is released, and still get to use all the newest stuff.
The only thing to watch for is testing isn't covered by the Debian security team, so you need to pay attention to security advisories and make a call to keep or uninstall if a package you use has a security issue, as testing often doesn't get security fixes until a week or so after stable does.
Or for that matter, regular old Debian probably has 99% of what you need.