I'm sorry but being a little naive, but what is the big issue with Fedora 18? I moved to Fedora 18 from Ubuntu 12.10 because it was so awfully buggy. Every other time I turned on my laptop I would get a black screen with an error message. Another reason were the Amazon search results in Unity.
I do (perversely) use Fedora to see where RHEL is going longer-term, and 18 has been really rough for me so far. Not impossible, just demoralizing.
Is the installer buggy, or just un-usably confusing? It's both. Sometimes the "submit" type of button is waaaay down in the lower right (e.g., "Continue", and sometimes it's in the upper left ("Done"). Modals are not differentiated from full screens.
Forget customized partitioning -- I tried everything I could and never got it to fully accept my very ordinary partitioning choices. An exercise in frustration.
To summarize, it feels like a thick, hard-to-remove layer of dysfunctional GUI gunk has been added needlessly, and it's time-consuming trial and error to remove to get back to something more tolerably vanilla (e.g., dig into grub, remove "rhgb quiet" and keep stripping things off until it's clean enough). And that's just the aesthetic stuff.
The xfce and lxde spins are vastly better but give fewer options for, e.g., little systray widgets, so I feel conky (really jurassic but lovable old pre-DE widget) is required.
If someone is looking for a "just works" distro, I'd recommend Crunchbang. Personally, I'll continue to work through the F18 issues and file bugs, but the problems are more philosophical than technical per se.
In comparison, Fedora 18 is superb.