It sure sounds very Debian-ish, at least. I’m a Fedora user, and Fedora stays veeeery close to upstream. It’s not rolling, but is very vanilla.

Agreed, but I don't think that has to do with either it's "vanillaness" or the 6 month release schedule. Fedora does a lot of compatibility work behind the scenes that distros not backed by a large company more than likely couldn't afford.