I want to rotate from family to family without EA's Story Progression allowing other inactive sims aging or promoting in their jobs, changing, etc.
I disabled story progression and stopped aging, but my inactive sims still progressed.
So this is my first time downloading a mod and I'm wondering if AWESOMEMOD by Pescado or StoryProgression by Twallan works better with stopping inactive sims from progressing and aging.
When I do decide to pick one, do I pick enable or disable their own story progression.

And any advice for downloading a MOD for the first time will be greatly appreciated!!

You will most certainly get a lot of feedback on this. I can't speak on Awesomemod so not certain if it works better stopping inactives from progressing. You can do anything and everything with Twallan's SP. You'll want to start slowly with that one as it is massive but the base mod would work fine for what you are asking. As you get used to it you'll want to add some of the modules for even more options. Not sure if you've had the opportunity to read any of the documentation so am linking to Story Progressing FAQs . It's a lot of reading but don't let it scare you off If you decide to go with the NRaas Mod there's plenty of help over there.

For help with installing mods and a link to the Mod Folder framework download This Wiki Link might be helpful.