If you haven't yet, don't worry about it. I've found what I want... or better yet, what I want before I know enough to find myself comfortable around Arch Linux.
CentOs.
What a marvelous distro. Now, this is what I'm talking about. It works. It doesn't "just" work.
It's simple, elegant, and 100% binary compatible with RHEL. No fancy stuff. It offers the stable (which means older and heavily tested) versions of most software and I'm free to upgrade to more recent versions only those I wish. This is the perfect distro to learn about Linux. I won't have to fight against it during or after install and I'm free to concentrate on what really matters; what is and how do I use Linux.
Not a single crash or system halt yet, 24h after installation and after having done such ludicrous things as having pulled over 20 different windows at the same time while playing a short home-made movie from a NTFS mounted partition and at the same time playing an mp3 from another similar partition while downloading and instafling a package from Yumex (the much better yum GUI).
One secondary note though: I was a little unfair towards Fedora 9, apparently. The thing is a testbed for RHEL. It's supposed to have all the wacky gizmos e weird experimentations, plus 0.x versions and such.