For me
Mint
Manjaro
Zorin
Garuda
Neon
Couldn’t agree more. Arch is great if you need a malleable distro, Debian is for everything (else).
Debian is great if you want a stable distro. If you want the latest software run… Debian + Flatpak
I’ve not used Gentoo in years but I really ought to give it another go. Do you still have to compile everything from scratch or are there binary repos now?
Bu the more you diverge from the default the more portage will compile packages for your setup.