As Paul says Debian may be a good choice if you want to mess with the nuts and bolts more than YaST/SuSE encourages.
Actually one of the problems with SuSE is that once you start messing beyond the SuSE packages and YaST configuration you can end up with quite an unstable and unpredictable system because YaST makes a lot of assumptions (like only packages in the RPM database have been installed, and only YaST has modified configuration files)
Also I would consider Ubuntu, Ubuntu is essentially Debian made easy, it has a reduced package selection (although there is nothing stopping you adding debian packages) but (in my experience) has better hardware support out of the box and offers a slightly more polished initial configuration.
I was pure SuSE on the desktop from about 2001, but like you I felt that I was being insulated from the system, also I fancied a change. So I moved my main machine over to Ubuntu a few months back, One of my laptops and a machine in my office are now Ubuntu as well. Generally I am pretty happy with the changeover (the main problems I have had are AMD64 specific and therefore may not affect you)