I liked this quote by Linus Torvalds from this excellent discussion.
I have a web browser and three terminal windows open and that’s pretty much it. I have no need for a distro to do anything fancy for my own case. I use make, gcc, bash, and xterm. Or gterm or anything, I don’t even care which terminal.
That describes me perfectly. Unfortunately, I need my distro to be able to not do anything fancy.