I agree with your reasons. But on the flip side, I've installed Debian a few times in the past, and I always end up wanting packages or versions of packages tha

I agree with your reasons. But on the flip side, I've installed Debian a few times in the past, and I always end up wanting packages or versions of packages that aren't available. Over time my package source lists end up changing to Ubuntu anyway, and after some upgrading, I'm essentially running Ubuntu, upgraded in place from the Debian base install.