Up until recently, I have been using Suse (both for servers and workstation usage – I am typing this comment on a openSuse, KDE based workstation). True, Novell does maintain / develop Suse and Novell has a long history of providing network services within a MS Windows environment (I have deployed and administrated many Novell Netware networks - both bindery and directory services environments - I started using Netware over 20 years ago. Hell, I am starting to feel old! 
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Novell / SUSE has a long and complex relationship / history with Microsoft (who remembers the Novell / MS patent agreements of the last decade?). Suse is still one of my favourite distributions. I love the idea of centralised system control panels like Yast (I also like Mageia Control Center - how many people can remember Mandrake?). Suse / Novell has been known to contribute to various OSS projects including Open / Libre Office and KDE (OpenSuse maintains one of the best KDE workstation environments available).
@panoptiq, considering the history of Novell, I can understand why you trust / use Suse.
Anyway, ignoring my love of Novell, I want to pick up on two issues:
A. It is a bit unrealistic to expect a provider of a distro to completely change the base setup (you wouldn’t expect Canonical to change Ubuntu from a Debian to a Gentoo based disto). This change would involve a lot of work.
Nevertheless, it would be interesting to see a new Smb / server distro based on Suse (I have deployed quite a few servers based on openSuse and Webmin).
B. I have some concerns about BTRFS, I have read various documents that would suggest that BTRFS is not stable enough to be used in a live environment and I have found that BTRFS snapshots can consume a lot of disk space when running Suse with a reasonable sized root partition (20GB).
I would recommend that you use EXT4 on any root / system and home partition (you can try XFS on large home / data storage partitions).