I have many productive things I could do…but I feel this need to try Slackware as my daily driver / bare metal for a week or so and see if I can make it. Nostalgia I guess. I know it’s gonna be a pain.
15.0 or current? IMO lack of software will make you return as fast as you go, we’ll see…
15.0. And, I’ll get right on that as soon as I can figure out how to get it to see my NVME drives 
Oh I’m not going anywhere, EOS is home. I’m just playing. My EOS disk image is ready to be zipped back on at a moments notice.
At least for me, Slackware was my distant past back in the days it was bundled with books and came on floppy disks.
I’m sure it’s …more…now than then, but I have no desire to return to those days.
The version before 15.0 was the latest stable release for 5 years, I wouldn’t go for stable even for experimentation. In 5 years time we will be running Plasma 6 30th Anniversary Edition while 15.0 is still on 5.23 25th AE 
Tolerated 32-bit Slackware largely because of Wine, because I’m into music production with VST plug-ins. Hate the push toward 64-bit and VST3 which is buggy and clumsy and don’t have a lot of cash to buy the neat programs associated with it. The “Kushview Element” isn’t the messiah, I’d donate though if I could: get in line, first Slackware, Porteus, two Russian music developers and a few others. I installed one app on Windows10 that for good reason became freeware after at least 25 years of development. These days I rarely go into Windows.
I was afraid of “-current”, tried Liveslak DAW but was a great fuss getting an USB disk with persistence and I had to accept whatever it came with. To me it wasn’t better than Ubuntu Studio which was very slow to start on my HDD, installed “Jammy” LTS soon after release but removed it 1-1/2 weeks later. For Slackware I was forced to pick Plasma because the XFCE version looked too much like Void which I intensely disliked, was inflexible with appearance especially the mouse cursor. I couldn’t select “musl” version which sucked. Nevertheless I liked Void until it spattered the last three times I full-upgraded it. Also got bored and replaced it with Slackware. Because I forgot to install “network manager” for the Slackware XFCE, I tried again with the other D.E. Long live the slack!
It’s kind of cool compiling my own stuff but I have been a bit afraid of copying resulting programs “directly” into “/usr”, “/lib” and places like that. “Oh it’s like WindowsXP pretty much!” No it’s not, it’s Linux. I wish I could still have a computer running WindowsXP, only for one thing I like to do. Otherwise EndeavourOS and a couple of others would have to occupy less than 1-1/2 years I have left on the Internet subscription.
For the first thing you said: don’t try it.
I speak only from experience. I installed 32-bit Slackware. The installation program has a few misses. It offers to install bootloader with LILO, why not GRUB? For 64-bit it offers ELILO instead, I just want out of that mess which, after the system is installed and booted, it warps the screen so I can’t see the two penguins at the top and cannot read the messages until it cares to reset the screen. The “install-DVD” boots with GRUB, which is why I say this. The “setup” asks the user if he/she would like to enable “gpm” to be able to do tricks with the mouse in cold terminal. The problem is that program interferes with the GUI mouse handler which disabled my touchpad sometimes which was infuriating.
It’s not as bad as I had thought, but I had to edit a few text files. Had to do so to disable that “gpm”. I had to edit an “/etc/init.d” or something like that so it goes into “init 4” D.E. instead of “init 3”. I have been distro-hopping the past few months so I have to look out for when the “swap” partition has its UUID changed, and then for Slackware edit the “/etc/fstab”.
Another thing is that neither “install-DVD” nor “Liveslak” seem to come with “installpkg” or related utilities any longer, making it near impossible to remove apps without risk to the system. To install stuff I have been getting by with Slackbuilds, but it’s not always successful.
I’m not advocating Slackware or any other Linux nor OS, but “Phear the Penguin” isn’t for everybody.
That said I’m happy to be able to fire up a 30-year-old OS whenever I want!