My vote would be Fedora, too. I've been hopping between distros for 16 years now. Funnily enough, I switched from Arch to Fedora.
And it just works, no broken dependencies or breaking a sweat when you forgot to update for two weeks.
If you can get used to the concept of an immutable file system (as discussed by @Guenther_Amanita) + flatpaks, it is really a smooth system without hassle. You should upgrade to the next version every 6 months - worked flawlessly for me the last two times (you should do backups before obviously).
Lack of AUR could be a thing - how much do you use it? I would say, that is the only weak point for Fedora regarding your requirements.
For me, it's the perfect balance between recent packages , stability, and user experience.
Please let us know what you decided and why - I am curious to hear about your reasons!
Cheers for letting me know!
if your comfortable with it, go for it -I think that's the important part.
You should be good if you keep your system updated, a seperate home partition is a good idea.
In the end, we all use (GNU/)Linux. I think the differences are often exaggerated here. Sure, your package manager may vary but under the hood they tend to be quite similar (apart from being immutable or other special cases).
Have fun with Endeavour, fellow wanderer and thanks for the thread, it was a quite interesting read!