What you are describing sounds exactly like static IPs, but set from the router. Which, technically, is what I want.
I guess it’s the terminology that makes this confusing then. Like. It is a ‘DHCP Reservation’ even though it is not an IP that is within the DHCP scope. In my brain, DHCP by definition is dynamic, so a ‘reservation’ would be an address that is normally assigned dynamically, that you now tell the router to hold on to and only assign when a specific MAC address shows up.
I can change my DHCP scope so that it doesn’t assign all the IPs in my address range (I’m actually doing this already; I only dynamically push 100-199, and typically leave 2-99 open for statics). So, I can definitely make this work in my current implementation. I was just expecting the wrong thing I guess.
Thanks for the help!