deciding whom to choose for nameservers
This is tangential to your actual question, but why not host your own? I’ve had good experiences with self-hosting an authoritative nameserver for my domains. I personally use BIND (named), but I know someone who does the same with nsd and that also works very well.
edit: actually, might as well add the reasoning behind my choice of TLD, since it’s pretty simple. It’s a .de domain because I’m in Germany :)