3D overload

Well, I and a whole industry do. I guess you don't watch "blockbuster" movies if you feel nauseated by Compiz, but +90% of all visual effects in big budget movies are created (not just rendered) on Linux, and great OpenGL acceleration is very much needed. Right now Nvidia is King with their proprietary driver, and will be for some time yet.

As others have stated 3D is not only for games and Compiz (which I don't use). Perhaps you could couple CAD and DCC together, but with a modern graphics card and Blender you have the tools to create without it being "exclusively highend-only". Unfortunately the open source stack is not yet capable or stable for this task. I personally hope that 3D will get a lot more attention, especially for serious work. What good is a "multi-teraFLOP" GPU when it can only drive wobbly windows?

About Fedora12, we are currently running F10 on our graphics workstations albeit very customized. I'm planning to evaluate F12 soonish but have thought about looking for another distro... F10 is working decently for us though.