Debian recommends asks where the user is, and asks for a choice.
Yes, and that would be interesting to look at for future development within centos. The problem with this is that if that mirror becomes outdated or they withdraw the donation (has happened in the past) then you're stuck with no mirror. A while ago we had problems with stale mirrors. Even with this last update, it's taken a while for some of the mirrors to sync up properly. This is why we moved to the mirrorlist approach.
There's nothing stopping people from changing the repo file to suit
There's the small point that most users don't know they should, and unless they're prompted to confirm the choice, they won't go looking.
Valid point. This information may make its way into Ralph's hands for the wiki, but I'm not sure about creating a choice option, or shoe-horning something like that into firstboot. How would this be upgraded when changes to yum are made? There are some fundamental differences here between the debian mindset and the centos/yum mindset that will require much planning if this is undertaken.
But those are more competent than my wife (Ubuntu), my youngest daughter (RHL 5.x and more recently Ubuntu) or my boss (who pays me to look after his RHL 7.3 system).
This will be mostly opinion here, and is NOT to be taken as a view of the project itself. Consider the idea behind centos. It's a rebuild of RHEL, aimed at business servers, workstations, and other more industrialized settings. The primary goal of RHEL isn't really a home desktop type system, as that's what RH has fedora for. CentOS does make a good stable desktop, and I use it as such on a daily basis, however in my mind the parent roots carry down, and I do expect a higher level of competency from centos users vs ubuntu/fedora users. Debian doesn't really distinguish between classes of users. RMS would probably consider that facist and wrong.
The fact that the Fedora Project, Ubuntu and others do it badly doesn't excuse us.
Indeed, however one also can't look to them to provide a milestone for centos for all things.
Most of the people on these lists are fairly competent, and could make a sane choice given the opportuntity.
Yes, and I'm not trying to argue the point, just clarifying the position. They've always had the opportunity. The choice was simply never forced on them.