I was always a little confused by how popular Ubuntu became. Canonical never did much to add value, often replacing more standard tools with strange canonical replacements that didn't survive the test of time.
If you use Ubuntu now, give Debian a try. The stability and community are really second to none. For all my personal use I run Arch, but I would not hesitate to run Debian in production instead of a commercial distribution.
I’ve been using Ubuntu in some form since the first versions in 2004, and mostly sticking with LTS since 2006. What won me over in the early days was the clear versioning story with predictable cadence of releases and support intervals, pragmatic approach to proprietary drivers and video codecs, and the fact that server and desktop were the same distro.
By comparison I never fully understood the Debian versioning story. I have no idea when the next version will become stable, or how stale the versions are in stable, whether I could install it without driver issues on my desktop, etc.
With Ubuntu I could take a break for a few years and know there will be an LTS release in April or 2022, that the previous LTS release was 20.04, and 18.04 was the one before that, etc. That each will be supported for 5 years and so on.
In my opinion you've hit on Ubuntu's biggest contribution to Free and Open Source software.
When I started using Linux a couple decades ago, "we ship when it's ready" was the dominant FOSS approach, and I thought it was the most sensible approach.
Then I got my first job and experienced the realities of enterprise support and planning. Today I wish more projects were as predictable as Ubuntu, and I'm gratefully for every one that is.
Ubuntu is far from my favorite distro technically, but the predictability of its LTS releases makes it my recommendation for most uses.
What complicated it is that usually when you were coming to Debian you were coming from Slackware or a BSD, so everything you knew about init systems and software distribution went out the window. Where's rc.local? Why did ./configure && make && make install destroy my system? Also: we're talking about 20 years ago: everything was harder then.
If you came from a BSD, then you (were supposed to) already know why make install is not a good idea. Although Debian package management was not particularly similar to FreeBSD ports and packages, the fundamental idea was the same.
I use Debian, a lot, I happily run it on most of my servers. But I can completely understand that it's not great for the majority of users.
Stable is too stable for the average desktop user - often kernel is missing drivers for newer hardware models, or system libraries are too old for newer applications.
Testing works most of the time but is not stable enough. Most recent example; zfs, which is on 0.8.x, is completely broken in testing since the kernel upgrade to 5.10 in December. zfs has not (and prob will not) backported 5.10 compatibility to 0.8.x. Last I heard, the Debian maintainers were still not decided on if they are going to backport the 5.10 fix to their own fork of zfs 0.8.x, or if they're going to do the upgrade to zfs 2.0 already.
I had a couple of servers where I had stupidly enabled unattended-upgrades, which broke the filesystems and required recovery to make services start again. Annoying, but it was my mistake.
This kind of situation is completely expected and there's really no one at fault. But it is a good example of why vanilla Debian is not suitable for many users and use-cases. Mint does seem like a better Ubuntu, though.
Backport frankenware is probably the biggest reason I wouldn't recommend Debian.
They do not have the time and resources to figure out every inevitable configuration, and they end up supporting a mishmash of unsupportable software.
Backported ZFS just brings fear in my eyes, these filesystems have to have many decades of testing before people are comfortable with it, and Debian finds it acceptable to make a custom patched version. Not cool.
If you want to store all your data on that configuration then by all means, but I'm afraid I won't run a distro that plays games to avoid changing a version number.
They employ a number of people who maintain core Debian packages to work on Debian packaging full time and generally to land improvements in Debian.
I do agree that Canonical never did much to add value to Ubuntu beyond what they added to Debian, but they certainly added value to Debian, and ironically you don't even need use their distro for that, let alone pay them!
Two things that I would like to see in Debian. First, something more similar to Red Hat Kickstart. The Debian equivalent (Preseed) doesn't quite cut it (effectively it is an "answer" file for the Debian installation, so when the questions in the installation evolve you need to regenerate the preseed config (this is my understanding, everything I've read says that it would be really difficult to make a preseed configuration by hand).
Second, it would be nice if the package manager had an actual database behind it capturing everything that the rpmdb does. Instead you have a flat file with some of the data in it, and log files with other data (where the log files can be rotated out eventually). I want to be able to do things like "rpm -qa --last" on Debian. Or "yum history".
How difficult would it be to write a version of the apt suite of tools that uses an sqlite db? Would that break other items in Debian? It sounds like an interesting project to take on.
I think the best of both worlds would be an sqlite DB (which is extremely reliable) along with a rotated export to a flat file whenever there are modifications.
There is something called kickseed, which is documented on the Ubuntu wiki and seems to be available in Debian too, possibly in the Debian installer as well.
I was always a little confused by how popular Ubuntu became. Canonical never did much to add value, often replacing more standard tools with strange canonical replacements that didn't survive the test of time.
If you use Ubuntu now, give Debian a try. The stability and community are really second to none. For all my personal use I run Arch, but I would not hesitate to run Debian in production instead of a commercial distribution.