For a polished GNOME experience I recommend Fedora (once you know how to install the missing media codecs). Even Firefox there runs natively under Wayland and you also benefit from the latest advancements such as the Thunderbolt or performance managers.
It’s because Red Hat has the engineering talent and bodies to make a cohesive system by carrying a frankly insane amount of patches to bend all software to the RHEL way and tackle extremely ambitious userspace plumbing projects.
I’m so sad at what IBM will eventually do to them.
I think the proposal process works very well to modernize the distro and drive forward the improvements of the default installation, while in Debian the teams seem to do their own thing and innovation is very slow and even controversial (e.g., the systemd or merged /usr/ migration are sad examples but even small things like a good zram setup, systemd-oomd, and btrfs by default make a large difference).
