Maybe what I’m looking for is the holy grail, but what do you guys suggest as a Distro with a good balance between stability and up-to-date packages?
Depending on your definitions of up to date and stable:
Any of the releases every 6 months distros are more stable and reasonably up to date - something like Fedora even keeps the kernel updated during those months
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is rolling release with something called “openQA” that is run on the distro before releasing the snapshot to help stability. It also uses BTRFS with something called “snapper” by default, so if something breaks, you can pick the previous version from the bootloader