Hi Mike,
The main reason for Debian is how painful is to work with CoreCDP OpenEmbedded version. Lots of packages are old and instead of focusing on creating the application logic I need to figure out how to create BitBake recipes for what I need (which is quite hard for me as I lack expertise in it).
For example the only version of python that worked out of the box was 2.6.6. Bitbake cannot assemble version 2.7.1 for me.
I understand that in the right hands this toolset is quite powerful but for me I tend to spend much more time on figuring how to compile things rather than writing production code.
I guess it is not that good comparison, but for instance we had very positive experience with Beaglebone running Debian.
Regards,
Alexey