I can comment on the Gnome issue. It just so happens that I was looking at the
(relatively) current Gnome release on my home machine last night.
1) I have high hopes for Gnome.
2) Gnome is not nearly ready for prime time. The developers don't claim to be
anywhere close to done. I don't think that the current release is useful
enough to be a significant motivation for upgrading.
3) If one is interested in looking at Gnome, however, having the 5.0 Redhat
release is a drawback. I only have it on my home machine (which is running
5.1) because there are a number of packages that have to be upgraded from the
5.0 release before Gnome can be installed. For that reason, it would be
convenient to have a release based on 5.2.
(I have to admit that I didn't install Gnome on the current Fermi release. The
number of packages to be upgraded may be smaller than I think.)
--Jim Amundson