Agreed, but I don't think that has to do with either it's "vanillaness" or the 6 month release schedule. Fedora does a lot of compatibility work behind the scenes that distros not backed by a large company more than likely couldn't afford.
> ...every package having several dozen patches trying to make a brand-new application release work with a decade-old release of libfoobar.
Applying non-vanilla flavor (patches) to libraries in able to make new packages work with old packages. (It's not just a library thing of course--I've run into packages on Debian where some component gets shimmed out by some script that calls out to some script to dynamically build or download a component. But I digress.)
Maybe I'm just out of the loop here, but I'm not aware of this being a general practice in Fedora. Yes, Fedora does a lot of compatibility work of course, but afaik the general practice isn't to add Fedora-flavored patches.
