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Actually, I may have been able to answer my own question with a quick Google search "Raspbian versus Ubuntu Mate"

For headless GUI-less operations, Raspbian Lite is preferred over Ubuntu Mate as there is less bloatware and overhead.

There's more community support with Raspbian but the gap is narrowing. All the common GPIO, hardware capabilities are in Mate so it's a draw there.

Since I'm running headless and want as little overhead from the OS as possible (want to save the CPU cycles for ROS), probably best I stick with Raspbian Stetch Lite for my ROS robots.

Still open to hearing other people's thoughts...