Thanks for all the responses so far, guys! HN has helped me immensely already. I should add that I am, by no means, a "newbie". I've coded and deployed many pr

Thanks for all the responses so far, guys! HN has helped me immensely already. I should add that I am, by no means, a "newbie". I've coded and deployed many production web applications in Debian that are still running today, and although as a programmer my focus is in programming itself, not server administration, I've been sufficiently well educated to configure and launch web apps with Debian a few times already. As of late, however, I've been looking forward to expand my knowledge and grasp a deeper understanding of Unix in general, how everything works beneath the nicer high-level tools. So when I ask what distro is the best, please note that I'm not asking what distro is the easiest. I want to know, from a engineering point of view, why so many spectacularly smart people choose, for instance, Gentoo and FreeBSD. Can any of the few who know why they want these systems name a few of the advantages they have over Debian, for instance?