If OP can find a V3 KE for a decent price then you get filament runout sensor and network connectivity, among with some other nice stuff. And for the failed print detection you can add a Nebula camera which isn't too expensive if you order it from Aliexpress. It also supports rooting so you can add some really nice stuff to it, like Mainsail. I have a KE and I'm pretty happy with it since I got it for a really good price. I don't think I would recommend it at full retail price though.

It will yeah, although with modern SSDs it really isn't a big problem. I've used an Samsung 840 EVO as L2ARC for 8 years now.

Try running a flow rate calibration in Orca slicer and adjust settings accordingly

Try changing to another upstream DNS server in Adguard (such as https://dns.cloudflare.com/dns-query) and see if the problem gets resolved?

Always had trouble with Nextcloud but ever since deploying it on NixOS it's been rock solid. Both performance and reliability.

Personally I would go for ZFS with the SSD as a L2ARC. But among the options you listed I would do BTRFS RAID1 if you're only gonna use two HDDs, and mdadm RAID5 with BTRFS on top if using three.

There is a flatpak but it's not published to flathub https://github.com/SoftFever/OrcaSlicer/tree/main/flatpak