I think there is no other wallet that supports RPC calls except Electrum without downloading the full blockchain.
I don't know exactly what you want to achieve and another thing is you are not looking for a payment gateway but it seems that you want to develop a payment solution on your own without using any 3rd party like Bitpay but I still think that you want a payment gateway that doesn't need any 3rd party.
How about check the BTCpayserver it's not a custodial 3rd party wallet it's a payment gateway that you need to host with your own it means no 3rd parties.
However, it still needs Electrum to connect it to the hosted BTCpayserver through uploading the wallet file or through a master public key(For safety master public key would be the best).
This doesn't need so much data so it won't be a problem compared to installing Bitcoin core with full node. But the problem is if you are going to add more other cryptos as you mention above then you will need to host a full node of those coins.
All you need for guide and development of this you can find here
https://docs.btcpayserver.org/You're right in that I'm looking for similar functionality to a payment gateway, I just dont want to use a 3rd party for it for multiple reasons. One is I dont trust them, another is I have no need for a USD offramp, and I also have a need to send out payments as well as receive them. The payment gateways I have seen so far have all been 3rd party hosted. I have not seen/heard of btcpayserver but I'll check into it, I like the self hosted nature and wasnt aware there were self hosted options available. So maybe I can amend my original ask to include self-hosted payment gateways if they have a "Refund" option as well. I dont think this btcpayserver will satisfy the need for multiple cryptos given it's name though :/
EDIT: I have discovered this which is exactly what I was looking for:
https://docs.btcpayserver.org/Development/Altcoins/#how-can-i-add-an-altcoin-to-btcpayserver I should be able to add cryptos that I need to it as I see fit if a contrib plugin doesnt yet exist (it did have a good handful listed already, among them was Dash, Monero and LTC, 3 of the cryptos I was looking to add). So thanks for the link to this. It's more of an option than I first thought.