I've been down this road many times over the years, and each new promised land of logging always fails to replace syslog for me. Nothing else is as widely-compatible and performant. Fortunately, there are some great tools out there to modernize the network-admin experience: syslog-ng is a favorite of mine.
Same boat here. Go as simple as possible (syslog) as the base, and you can bolt on whatever the hell other tools you’d like to perform advanced functionality if you really want it.