Some say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Here I am, trying to find a distribution which fits my modest and sane requirements.

• Rolling release. That's not too hard, and there are more than enough distributions doing exactly that.
• Reasonable stability.
• Decent package management. Providing decent performance, integrity maintenance and of course clean up of unneeded packages (this last one seems to be hard to some).
• Of course I'd like to look at something quite nice. The ability to tweak things would be appreciated and downloading themes would be great too. Of course nobody provides all this together.
• And a decent package management front-end would be nice too (like, not simply showing a huuuuuuge list of software). Solus had this right.
• Not having to drop to CLI would be nice too. There are some that do this quite well.
• Good performance.
• Decent automatic configuration.

Now, here comes the crux. Solus (budgie) seems to do all this quite right... and then mess up in the package management derpartment.

Kaos has a decent looking interface, but it's rough around the corners and don't get me started about stability.

Then I look at Manjaro. Boots ok, installs ok and then ends up sucking, even after some time spent configuring.

Ok, on to openSuSE... RPM... there are some resentments there. Also some nightmares. I'm not going to subject myself to that torture again.

Now, before I end up looking at each and every distribution in distrowatch, I think I might ask here if anyone has a decent idea. Please? Getting desperate here.

Well, sorry for this, but I need to promote my favorite distro - Funtoo. Based on Gentoo. Except "Not having to drop to CLI would be nice too. There are some that do this quite well.", it can have everything you want - if you're unwilling to do that look elsewhere. And you need to compile all the packages too (so it's not that fast).
Also, you can avoid systemd (or not, your choice) :-)
Here: http://www.funtoo.org/

Rolling release and stability don't often go together! Your best bets are PCLinuxOS and Manjaro. You don't want anything Debian-based if you dislike the command line.

You have to remember that choosing a distro is like choosing a home: you are never going to get 100% of the features you were looking for. You get the best option, change what you can, and learn to live with what you can't!

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Well, the "almost perfect" option is Solus... guess I'll just need to keep track of the installs by hand and complain and moan to the devs.

Everything is just perfect with that OS, it's just that the package manager doesn't clean up when needed.

Like others, I don't exactly understand the idea of a rolling release with stability. I don't think the two really go together. That said, OpenSUSE is something you should look at. I don't know when you last tried a distro using RPM, but it's probably time to re-evaluate your resentment. RPM management is a fine-tuned system at this point, offering all the benefits of apt, certainly, and arguably a lot more. OpenSUSE for rolling release is a great option, in spite of its use of RPM.

The Going Linux Podcast gave Sabayon a very good review recently.

Antergos Based off of Arch and is very close to the Arch repos, simples to set up and maintain plus you have access to the AUR

Personally for desktop simplicity of setup I'd go for Cinnamon but it's all personal taste there