If you want a new microcontroller to get into I recommend the raspberry pi pico, and yes it has a crystal.
If I was building something de novo, I would just use a raspberry pi pico and a tmc2209 and stepper motor, I have gotten quite smooth silent motor at the rpms you are talking about and they are easy to interface to, source etc. lots of torque too. All you need to do it is feed it a pulse train and it will give you smooth quiet motion at low rpm and high torque right out of the box. The features that do most of the smoothing are already enabled.
However I wouldn’t use the pico for simplefoc stuff. The STM32 G431 whatever is the winner there.