Yes, but I've been considering both operating systems to have changed for the better, not just fedora for some weird reason.

It still is an utter pain if you ever need to get close to the rpm system.

Probably what he means is that a make install (or whatever the incantation, it’s been a while since I compiled a kernel) just works on Fedora and never has to deal with the rpm nonsense (I use Fedora too, but packaging is even more dreadful than deb, if you can believe it)