Then there’s the part where I’d still need to explain how franchising works

Hah! I love how palpable you made your exasperation!

Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?

This guy:

(OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).
Or maybe Slowroll.

Is this the tiling manager people talk about all the time?

Ye, Microsoft’s Head of Monetization, Nolan Sorrento, calls it “Pure O2.”