(responding to Patrick, George, and Samuel)
Thank-you for your responses.
I'm almost certain that I'll want a dual-boot system on the new workstation: Fedora + one other t.b.d. Linux distribution. In that situation, does it matter which file system I'll use? Also, am I correct in assuming that file system choice do not affect the choice of hardware?
Am I the only one sensing a business inconsistency in what Fedora and Redhat are doing? Since Fedora is the upstream for RHEL, and RHEL forks off Fedora, I would think that they would have the same default file system unless Red Hat wants to switch to btrfs as a default within the next couple of versions. I do know that btrfs is only Fedora's default; they do support other choices. (On my current workstation, I'm using ext4.)