Bra-fuckin’-vo. No irony here, just kudos from one person to another: you’ve not only found someone compatible, you’ve worked out a way to, well, work the issues out.
And as you’ve said: it’s not one vs the other, it’s you vs the issue at hand. Chef’s kiss
Some of recommendations I did not already see, that are not-that-well-known; all of these are various flavors of melodic death metal:
Parasite Inc. - Once and for All
The Agonist - Panophobia (unfortunately, the band is now defunct)
Okay, I’ll try to take a stab at this point by point:
Seconding k3d (and, by extension, k3s). If you’re in a market for sth suitable for more upstream-compliant clustering solution (k3s uses SQLite instead of etcd, iirc), RKE2 is also a great choice