Well, I don’t know what changes the bumblebee/nvidia install did to your system that are still present. And I don’t know
if your problems with nouveau are caused by those changes or just because of bugs/shortcomings of nouveau.
The main question is how religious you are about using opensource drivers. IMHO if the proprietary driver works (and especially if it works better) why not use it?
If you just don’t want to reinstall the nvidia driver after each kernel update, then you’re fine with the rpm packages. They are built in a way that a reinstall isn’t necessary. And you also get updates automatically.
If you really want to test nouveau and want to get it to work, I would suggest a reinstall from scratch.
You can have several installation in parallel on different partitions and keep your working installation as fallback (or for doing work ;)) and play around on the other(s). You could even install Factory then to see if newer nouveau and kernel versions work better for you.
But if you have questions about that, it would be better to open new threads then…