As somebody who's gone from: RedHat 5/6 -> Slackware -> Gentoo -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Debian. Debian (and it's derivatives) is the best of breed and will always be my distro of choice. Great job yall!
I have almost the same way:
Redhat 5 -> Mandrake -> Gentoo -> FreeBSD -> Slackware, and finally Debian Etch in April 2007.
I've been using Debian for the latest 16 years and am very happy with it.
You need to be more specific with Red Hat :). I'm guessing you meant like "GNOME 1.2" era Red Hat that came on a CheapBytes CD.
My first distro was Red Hat 5 as well. It is disambigous, it was called "Red Hat Linux version 5". Red Hat Linux went to version 9 I believe before it split into RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Fedora.