Kind of creepy, but you just described, step for step, how I ended up running Fedora's KDE Spin on all my boxes over the past year. I really wanted to like Manjaro, I mean the AUR is incredible and their visual design even uses all my favorite colors, but despite my best efforts it felt alien to me in a way I can't well articulate.
Now enter Fedora for the past 4-5 months and I have to say I'm rather impressed. In particular, their package archives seem to keep current with a lot of the software I rely on far better than Debian/Ubuntu. Using dnf feels much more familiar than pacman ever did, and as of now I feel like my search for a daily driver has ended. I would recommend anyone else that's not happy with the experience of Ubuntu anymore to do likewise and see how Fedora feels in its place.
I went Fedora because of someones recommendation on HN when complaining about some issues I was having with other distros. But i too feel like my search for a daily driver has ended!
I love fedora, it just works. I've had 1 issue so far, NVidia GPU on Dell XPS 15. Had to disable noveau and its rock solid.