Surprised not to see Fedora at the top of the list. Fedora 23 is remarkably stable, great UI, easy to maintain, and can be upgraded in-place to the next version using the new upgrade tool, no more reinstalls.
I agree with you though. I got fed up with Ubuntu and switched over to Fedora a few months ago and have been pleasantly surprised at how well it works now. The Fedora team is even willing to fix stupid obvious bugs so I actually have my zsh manpages now and gmplayer works.
I like the idea, I just haven't taken time to go back and try again since then, and other distros have stepped up so I didn't have to either.
Maybe the author has had similar experiences that might have affected the choices?
yum (now dnf, which is a name I hate) is also my favorite of the mainstream package managers. It nearly perfectly balances ease of use with advanced capabilities, and maintaining private repos is an absolute dream (stick signed packages in a directory on a web server, run createrepo; repository is done!), compared to anything else. apt is a great, but managing repos for it is just awful (though I haven't had a chance to try aptly, which appears to potentially resolve this issue, though it still seems to be vastly more complex than createrepo).
So, yeah, Fedora remains my favorite, through many years and many attempts using other distros. I've flirted with Ubuntu a few times, going so far as having it as my primary laptop OS for a while. Partly it was because of the popularity of it; it's sometimes easier to install stuff on Ubuntu because the developers are more likely to be using Ubuntu. But, it's not worth the other trade offs, to me.
Also, I like that Fedora ships a close to stock, very clean, version of the most recent Gnome desktop. It feels very nicely integrated, while some of the alternative desktop variants feel bolted together from different pieces. Lots of folks seem to want to revert to the old 2.0 style Gnome, but I don't dislike modern Gnome (except that it has some awful quirks for multiple displays, where both displays do the shrink-and-dim thing, which is terrible for use with projections, presentations, watching movies, etc.).
The "bleeding edge" thing might be a turn-off for some, though. I've only had Korora (a Fedora spin with some pre-loaded apps and themes) for less than a month and I've already downloaded two kernel updates.
(sorry :>) I didn't use Linux for any desktop/laptop for years until it got easily bundled last summer with Fedora. Thanks to Mint for that, though.