Volt - Thanks. It's better than reading/playing trumpet sheet music and microbiology research papers all day... I hope...
I'd agree that the task is a large one but it will provide me an opportunity to find installation problems with each distro. Learning each one will take a great deal of time and I'm best with just one, but installing them all and giving them a quick once over will provide me a reasonable view of each. I can always dump them by re-formating the partition the distro I want gone is on and combining it with what I listed as sda9 above.
I'm still liking the look of Fedora Plasma but Ubuntu looks like it will be the most functional and with the greatest support, so I'll start there (Ubuntu).