Another HPC guy here. We don't get support from either Canonical or Red Hat, but I've worked in places that had "support" from both, and I agree with your asse

Another HPC guy here. We don't get support from either Canonical or Red Hat, but I've worked in places that had "support" from both, and I agree with your assessment that support for Ubuntu from Canonical sucks and that support from Red Hat is actually quite good. Yes, Ubuntu is not afraid to push out completely broken packages like it was Debian experimental. I don't know what to say about that: Test it before deployment on production? We have a custom package pushing system for our cluster and it's nodes. Users don't have shell access to these things, so it's not a huge deal. I've never had the kinds of problems you mentioned above regarding user input. There are ways of getting around those kinds of things. We will probably still be using CentOS, Rocks, and SciLinux for awhile since it's 3rd party and community supported, like you said. It's my personal opinion that the fundamental design, process, and community surrounding Debian is superior to Red Hat/CentOS, but sometimes you just gotta use what works. I'm not paid to fix bugs all day to make it work. I'm just paid to make it work. And sometimes CentOS/SciLinux just works.