Hi Casual,
while I think that the discussion has elements that are partly paranoid,
You should at least explain which ones. Said in this way it doesn't help and it just feeds the impressions someone has.
I'd like to know what the differences in GNOME among distributions might be, and if and how these differences are perceived by the audiences.
This topic has already been discussed many times. What might clarify that is a _honest_ comparison of the main two-three distributions founded on GNOME (fedora, ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS).
The difference I find are summed up in my first message in this thread (performance/responsiveness, customizations, patch policies, dependencies, ...).
Regards, A.