I've been running Fedora on a mid-2013 MBA (i7-4650U) since April last year, and I love it. I grew up on RedHat, switched to Ubuntu around 2010, but after Unity I've switched back to the other camp, and Fedora has been really stable for me.
Although, I don't use the custom packages, because most things worked out of the box. The only thing I have to do manually is update the display backlight driver after every kernel upgrade, but I do updates once a month, and it's a simple "make;make install" and an extra reboot.
I gave OS X a shot for about 2 years, but could never quite get used to some of the quirks.
I've met Carl Perry several times at a couple of OpenStack summits and mid-cycle operator's meetups. He's a nice guy, and seems like he's pretty smart, but he's got an opinion about everything and likes to hear himself talk. The last time we were in the same room was when we were in the same working group. I don't remember what our topic was, but all I remember was Carl completely derailing any kind of discussion we had in the room.
I've been part of the OpenStack community for about two years (working for an OpenStack operator) and I've had nothing but good experiences. Developers that I've met seemed genuinely interested in hearing our pain points and other operators are interested in sharing their experiences running OpenStack and learning from our experiences.
It's really not that hard to contribute to OpenStack, you just have to play by the community rules, learn to listen a little, and don't piss people off with arrogance. Oh, and about the price of attending a conference, $600 for a full access pass. Is that a lot?