It's a good idea to pick a relatively popular distro, since it will be easier to find answers to your questions and since having more users/developers tends to result in fewer bugs. Look at lists of popular distros, filter by your requirements and preferences, and try them out.

You said you wanted more up-to-date software. If you want to be on the bleeding edge, you might want to consider a rolling release distro, such as Arch or its derivatives. Arch is great if you want to hand-craft your installation starting from a bare-bones tty. If that's too much trouble, something like Manjaro or EndeavorOS will give you up-to-date packages but with an easier installer and more preinstalled packages.

If you don't want a rolling release, there are other distros which release more frequently than Debian stable. Ubuntu releases every six months (although anecdotally most users seem to stick with the LTS releases). Fedora releases every six months or so. openSUSE Leap releases every twelve months or so.

There are three main families of disro’s (Redhat, Debian, and Arch). The vast majority of disro’s are based off one of these. Once you pick a family you want the actual distro usually doesn’t really matter. The differences beyond the main family tend to cosmetic, which IMO is kind of pointless. The thing I enjoy about Linux is customizing it to my liking, I pretty much never want what a distro offers by default.

The main difference in the families is the package manager. So, long story short, pick a distro with a package manager you like (or want to try), and forget about most of the rest. The only other detail worth paying attention to is the type of release a distro follows (rolling or not), pick whatever release method suits you best.

Depends on your usage, for stability use slow moving distro and LTS versions.

For cutting edge development use a rolling distro with an LTS kernel.

Further there isn't that much difference between distro families, devil is in the details and most modern distros let you choose them, do you want Pulseaudio and/or ALSA, systemd or rc or other alternatives, and so on.

I personally use Manjaro on most of my computers and raw Arch on specialist ones (mainly because there is a lot of Arch related knowledge and info online).

I just install Ubuntu, remove snap, and be done with it. I don't have time to mess around with Arch or Gentoo anymore, I want things to just work.

In fact this is why I use Ubuntu through WSL2 on Windows rather than a bare metal Linux install, the Windows side makes sure all device drivers are functional with no effort, plus I can play games when I want to without Proton.

Seldom do I see any of the OpenSuse flavors touted on here. Curious about the reasons why, general perceptions, etc. Its been around a long time, has many users, but seemingly not much support here or in the web media generally.

If I were you, I'd simply install Ubuntu and move on.