Lots of great recommendations here. You can't really go wrong with any of them.
But since you mentioned forward thinking (and to some degree gaming friendly), I wouldn't really recommend Mint. It's rock solid but that implies that it's slow moving and not very forward thinking.
Bazzite seems to be a good gaming choice. But sometimes, (rarely) these newfangled immutable distros can be a bit hard to get help for.
So I would recommend going with Fedora.
ETA: What hardware are you planning to run this distro on?
You don't have too new hardware so Mint (with its older kernels) wouldn't be a problem. But yeah, sticking with Fedora (or Bazzite) seems like a better option for you
The devs of Bazzite/Bluefin/Aurora are all very active on Discord and helping people with issues every day. So long as you dont mind using Discord, getting support shouldn't be an issue.
They do have a forum too, its just much less active since its faster to get realtime support. I probably sound like I work for them, but I just think having almost no maintenance is nice. https://universal-blue.discourse.group/
Yeah, that's why I mentioned it. They aim to be the best general purpose desktop images so they kind of have to be where the users are, but itd be nice if they had Matrix bridges or something.