[LAU] Patch wars ? Debian vs. Fedora vs. ...

All, Until now I was naively thinking that The Source of any package was where 'It' was. Eg. To get, compile and install a package, the web page of the package's project was where to get it. A colleague at work started to seed some doubt. He's totally pro-Debian and one argument is that the Debian people are patching source packages to fix things. And they eventually submit their patches upstream. And some are sometimes rejected, for whatever reasons. Following that thought, then we can say that the Fedora/Red Hat people are no fools either and they also patch source packages to fix things. And they also submit to upstream. And it could be that some of these patches do not make into the upstream package for whatever reasons. And then the SuSE people, the Mandriva people, the 64Studio people ... Would this then mean that actually a distro can be better than another in a slice of time t ? That you would not find that Qjackctl or Ardour (only examples, no bugs in there .. :-) bug if you use distro x over distro y ? What are your opinions on this ? Are any of you believing that using a certain distro brings more stability regarding the applications ? This is not about the integration of all applications into the system/desktop but rather strictly on a software development/bug fix basis. Can one distro be better than another because of the fixes the maintainers of that distro do on the packages ? Cheers.