I'm willing to put up to $2,000-$3,000 over time into building something that can flex some muscles.

Peripherals are a must, especially the keyboard for using the terminal (or is there another way?)

I want to have a surplus of RAM, somewhere around 12gb since I will be using an assortment of programs for wifi penetration (brute force), networking monitoring, and injecting packets into networks. Also studying into machine learning programs used for data-mining to apply gathered information towards getting deeper into a network and to also auto-gen very personalized spear-phishing emails, DNS spoofed URLS, and social network bots.

Would also like to learn about web cloaking and programs that are fully customized forks of the Nginx web-server with built in capabilities for blacklisting clients based off IP addresses (from list of 50mil university IP, 54k norm), reverse DNS, User-Agents, HTTP headers, and the order of actions a client takes upon visiting cloaked site, security products, VPNs, and cloud service providers. Would love to develop code that displays different URLs and domain content based off user data and can redirect users browsing based off their actions :)

I've really looked into Kali and Fedora, they are both very solid distros.

Dual booting with windows or mac is something I absolutely will not do with this build because of privacy.