OP: Great writeup, thanks for that. I was wondering.. if price wasn't a part of the equation (I know it is, but humor me), would you still have migrated?
I look at the offerings in general and despite the fact that I've used neither, but am going to, it does look like Linode offers slightly 'more', albeit for a substantially higher cost?
It really depends on your use case. I run my personal website, my blog, and a couple of other websites that get decent but not spectacular traffic (think a few K visits a month tops). I think that made Digital Ocean a pretty good choice for me because I take advantage of better (IMO) management tools, better third-party apps, etc. However, if you're running some seriously high-load stuff, Linode has some enterprise-level features that DO lacks, like load balancing. Linode also seems to have somewhat more technically competent support from what I've read; I've never had to use either company's support though.
I look at the offerings in general and despite the fact that I've used neither, but am going to, it does look like Linode offers slightly 'more', albeit for a substantially higher cost?