I may be opening up a can of worms, but what is the best exterior deck stain? I am trying to get another 5 years out of our rather large deck, which structurally is in good shape. I need to strip the horizontal surfaces prior to staining.

Hello everyone, I'm finally going to start working on my deck. My deck currently uses the floor joists from the 1st floor of the house as the base for the flooring. Over the past few years I have painted it with water proofing, but that hasn't helped. Towards the edge of the deck the joists are badly rotted. I am hoping to take the deck apart and sister some 2x12s to the joists coming out of the house. I'd like to stop this type of rotting from happening again but don't know what to use. Standard paint on waterproofing isn't helping. I'm going to buy pressure treated wood this time and was thinking of getting some type of joist cap to line all of the wood with. I also looked into draping a waterproof membrane across each joist as well. The Trex escape system looks nice, but I'm sure it's very expensive. Any ideas?