Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?

This guy:

(OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).
Or maybe Slowroll.

Is it pronounced like that Super Troopers Porsche song?

Ah yes!
Cleric Maria Rainer of the Tetragrammaton.

Is this the tiling manager people talk about all the time?

Ye, Microsoft’s Head of Monetization, Nolan Sorrento, calls it “Pure O2.”