WRT Arch: it grabbed my interest because having the option for the most current updates sounded appealing. It may not be necessary, but if the situation arises and it would help, I’d like to have it.
Fair. This is a legitimately good reason.
The Arch wiki has also been a big incentive
Friendly reminder that the contents of the excellent ArchWiki translate surprisingly well to other distros.
as well as the AUR
Which you’re free to benefit from regardless of which distro you end up installing as long as an Arch container offered through e.g. Distrobox is setup on your system. Not all packages are supported like this, as custom kernels offered through the AUR have to be installed natively and thus require to be installed on Arch(-based distros). But most of your needs from the AUR (or literally any repo/package from any of the supported containers distros) should be satisfied regardless.
If I’m not mistaken, Arch is also a distro that allows me to pick and choose aspects of my operating system with intention as opposed to having a system that comes with stuff that I don’t use or need.
Correct. Though, while Arch defaults to a blank slate. Other distros like Debian, Fedora and openSUSE (to name a few) do offer similar functionality on specific ISOs (or just as an option in the YaST installer for openSUSE).
I was also looking at TW because it was a distro that supported KDE, but I’m learning from this thread that KDE is not ideal if I’m looking for a Wayland session.
That’s perhaps a bit too harsh on KDE Plasma without giving it an honest shot first. Don’t let others’ opinion on the matter deter your willingness to genuinely explore, experience and judge for yourself 😉. Furthermore, it’s important to note that the development of Wayland has accelerated (relatively) recently. Therefore, the issues of others might have already been resolved since.