tbh I'm pretty sure the issue I ran into was user error anyways, but once I finally figured out what I was doing, I decided to land on xfs for root and btrfs for home for the following reasons.
- xfs is supposedly more performant and common in data centers
- having a separate partition mounted at /home allows for os reinstalls or even distro swaps while retaining my home directory contents (assuming my user is the same)
- most of the contents I want backed up are held in /home. I don't want snapshots of my entire system laying around
- I like being extra