bakerjw

I'm kind of in a quandary and the posters here have been very helpful. Here is the scenario.
I am waiting on a Foundry Broadaxe large frame and am in the process of acquiring all of the components to get it on the road.
The purpose for this bike is only to do some bikepacking. Late next June I plan on touring the upper end of the Tour Divide route.
So, it is not being built to be an aggressive downhill or single track bike. It will be mainly rough forest roads.
Truth be told, if I could get away with a solid carbon fork, I'd go that route. I just like the suspension fork as it provides a margin of error if you hit a rut or something unexpectedly.
Since I'll be bikepacking, I will be carrying a fair amount of gear with weight more to the front than the rear due to the nature of the climbing involved.

I've settled on the Rockshox Reba RL series fork. My LBS spec'd out a 100mm fork as with the lowest price that they could find ($475.00).
I found a 120mm fork for $335.00.

I've ridden road bikes for many years and haven't been into mountain biking enough to be teribly familiar with fork technologies and such. Hence, I am asking here.
I know that the 120 versus the 100 should combined with the head tube angle will have some effect on how a bike handles. Of course I want to have a good handling bike, but I'm thinking that the extra weight on the front of the bike will offset the extra 20mm of fork travel.

With the extra weight on the fork, can you run a little lower pressure to drop them a bit under the load?

Any thoughts or insights are more than greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
John