Yes, you should try switching to a rolling release distro. Arch is great. I've been using it for the last five or six years now and have had no desire to switch to a new main distro, though I try out the major ones periodically and install them for certain applications.

Arch is definitely the best workstation for a developer. The convenience of binary packages, the flexibility of PKGBUILDs (analogous to Gentoo's ebuilds, but much more reasonable), vanilla packages and quick releases make it a dream workstation for a developer, despite a rare wonkiness here or there. It works much better than Ubuntu et al for a development box.