That surprises me. I've used Fedora for a while (it was preinstalled on a laptop that was gifted to me), and found that the repositories were both much smaller and much less well-maintained than the equivalents on openSUSE.
I have found a few handy tools that openSUSE had packaged long before Fedora. I think the credit for that goes to openSUSE's much more accessible build service :) Haven't had any issues with the repositories, myself, though - been using Fedora on and off since F11.
It mostly does. There are a few things that are in openSUSEs main repositories and not in those of Fedora, but in many cases the openSUSE packages were indeed in user repositories.
Fedora repositories were so bad for me that I ended up searching for Fedora packages on the openSUSE Build Service, and using those instead.
