I lived in the Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS world for a LONG time. I still work extensively in it. In general, you can do the same thing with both. Where the Debian family has apt-get, the Red Hat family has yum, etc.
My problem with the Red Hat line is this: You have to pay for Red Hat Enterprise, or get the CentOS free version of Enterprise - often several months or more out of date. Or you go for Fedora and are on the "bleeding edge" - and pay the upgrade/reinstall game every six months.
To give you an idea, a few years ago we built some core services on a Fedora 14 box (I knew it was dumb at the time, but you win some battles, and lose other battles). Current state of the world is Fedora 26. Things we have developed since that deployment no longer work on such an old distro, and there is no good upgrade/update path to get that FC14 box to FC16. We can't have it out of production that long; and it is too integrated into the environment that it can't be readily migrated to a newer system (the hardware at this point is old as well). While a similar vintage deployment on Long Term Service distros have been more easily updated, and don't run out of support quickly. They may not be *as* up to date, but they are more stable.
For production these days I insist upon a long term service distro, be it Ubuntu LTSB, or CentOS. I don't really care which.
For home users... I have tried using all manner of distros for people of varying levels of computer skill. The only one I would give to my mother would be Mint, with the Cinnamon desktop. By and large, it just works. Yes, all the same dials are there, all the same under-the-hood configurations are there and can be set however a power user wants them - but to the basic user, it just works. It's arguably more intuitive than moving to Windows 10, and is a lighter weight OS (much less disk space, lighter RAM footprint, and the CPU isn't touched unless I'm actually DOING something).
If I had to put my mother on a computer that I support remotely today, I would very likely put her on Mint. When push comes to shove (seeing as my father is currently managing all their IT support, and has been doing so since the 70s when we got our first computer) some day, I'll make the call based on the current state of the world. There's lots of opportunity for things to change.
Dependency hell will be with us - in fact, as one who delves deep into things, it exists in Windows land and Mac world too. The user is just sheltered from it for the most part - or you wind up taking it to the experts who figure out how to resolve it. I believe, Murph, you are dealing with that on the other thread right now :-D It is the nature of computers - it's just most people have gotten used to the Windows or Mac quirks; and the Linux quirks are "new" (to them).
