Well, it isn't scientific. It all depends on who sees it and who decides to
respond.

Many newbies don't read RSS feeds or journals and those that do may not feel
confident, experienced or committed enough to respond.

I am not stunned by the low Fedora or Debian numbers. Both are in decline.
Debian's is precipitous. Fedora users are geeks, but tend to keep a low
profile. Any high numbers that I have seen for Fedora tend to come out of
Fedora itself. They put it way ahead of Ubuntu, but usage figures from the
internet by independent sources are usually consistent with what most people
feel and that is that Fedora is well back of Ubuntu. Distrowatch figures are
high for Fedora, but I think that many people are led to try Fedora due to
its relationship with Red Hat and then abandon it when they find that it is
not easy to use. I have Fedora 12 installed for example, but don't use it
regularly.

Debian users are geeks and high profile, but not in a good way. Instead of
building up their distro they tend to look for ways to rain on someone
else's parade. They are always on attack mode, the Klingons of Linux, IMO.

Relative high Arch users probably attests to their geekiness (hence read
journals and RSS feeds) and enthusiasm for advancing Arch. PCLinuxOS is also
in decline and it is a newbie distro.

All of this is highly subjective and represents my gut feeling, but I have
watched this for years and am active on forums. I am not dissing Fedora or
Debian. I think both are excellent distros. I just think that Fedora is over
rated and that Debian users are a royal pain which is too bad because Debian
could be greater than it is.

Not mentioned by you is Mint which is number three in Distrowatch, just
behind Fedora. Every once in a while it nudges ahead. It has much momentum
and soon it will over take it for good. The only problem with Mint is that
it is too close to Ubuntu and should Canonical change its policy re:
restricted drivers and codecs then there is no reason for people to choose
Mint. Ubuntu is even changing its colours so that people can't harp about
the brown any more. However, as things stand Mint is a real contender.

My personal choice is Kubuntu. With KDE 4.4 (in Lucid) nothing comes close
to it for features, configurability and appearance. Any past criticisms do
not hold up. Besides it has no Mono.