12 or 13 years? Don't really remember or care!
With that budget, consider taking a look at Peak Design's Everyday Backpack. It's a different style than you're used to, but it hits all the boxes, and looks sharp. They
excell at better organization. But because they are slightly rigid, textbooks might weigh a bit weird if you have too many.
We have an everyday V2, totepack and two 30L travel packs, all highly recommend.
Organizr might be the closest thing you're looking for
In theory, kbin instances could load balance by defaulting where registration gets posted.
As a bonus when logging in, you typically shouldn't have to choose which instance you connect to because it's in the username.
Only downside of load balancing is differences in admins and federation.
Scrolled through the comments, how has no one not mentioned A Plague Tail? Amazing story from a woman's perspective
You would use the app to login to a specific instance, and access federated content through that instances API
Zorin OS is the way to go if you are sticking with the Debian/Ubuntu family. It's basically the Mac OS of Linux distributions, by shipping with a level of polish that other distributions don't deliver. To me this means I did zero tinkering out of the box to have the experience I wanted after spending a day configuring KDE in other distributions any time I did a reinstall. As far as printers go, they have always been hit or miss, but my problems were solved by disabling IPv6 on my local network.