This is my experience too, I distrohopped for about 2-3 years, and then when I found fedora it just clicked. I've been using it exclusively ever since. It was my first experience with vanilla GNOME and like you I wanted to meet the OS in the middle. The stability while still having reasonably up-to-date packages is so pleasant and everything felt like it was part of a whole in a way that my prior experimentation with arch and its derivatives and the different ubuntu skins didn't fully achive.
I "tolerated" GNOME after the GNOME 3 release, and used MATE for years before stuff started breaking on it. But KDE 6 has a nice vibe of something between Windows and Mac OS. Still really rough in a lot of spots, but you should definitely try it!
