Perhaps it's what you're familiar with and the intended use case. I personally can't stand the way APT won't let you override certain behavior. RHEL / CentOS have always favored stability over being bleeding-edge, and in my experience EPEL provides enough newer software to make the system usable for most cases, although if you're wanting the latest frameworks, etc.. I can see that being incompatible with your needs. I have very rarely had any problems with broken dependencies in Red Hat repositories except for the occasional 15-minute hiccup. SUSE seems to have more problems, but still has never been enough of a problem to make me question using it in production.
I think the third-party frameworks issue can be solved with LXC / Docker. If app x requires library y and supporting utility z, this can all be put into a container without having to update the OS's versions of y and z.
Although personally I've had more instances of running into an incompatibility with the older CentOS 5 kernel than with any of the libraries in the distribution - which LXC wouldn't be able to help with.
