If I had to choose a single module I would go for the disting because as you said it's the swiss army knife of modular. Clouds it's an amazing module especially if you have the mother 32 for additional processing and cv. I personally don't like the chord (bare with me, I never had one and never tested one, I just don't like the idea behind it), I would use that space for some modules for a proper synth voice or I would go for the Spectral Multiband Resonator to use in combination with the mother32.
I would like to recommend you for what about sampling the Gynkosynthese Sampleslicer, it's an amazing tool for sampling I have one, I love it and I use it a lot or if you want to stay classic you can go for the phonogene (altough it cost 4 times the Gynko) from Make Noise. If you want to spend big money you can go for some fancier samplers like the upcoming assimil8or from Rossum or the bitbox from 1010music (not that expensive but very interesting) or the ER-301 from Orthogonal devices.
Best!