What Are Bosons?

[Rhondazvous]

Yes it does. But I can't give you a definite answer. Not because the question is bad, but because I am not sure which of the things I think I know about particles are artifacts of the formalism used to analyze the theory, artifacts of the theory we use to describe nature, and which things are really truths independent of how one writes down and treats the theory. Furthermore, my understanding of theory has its limitations. Last but not least, "a particle" in common usage is an idealized thing which does not reflect the intricasies of the theory.

With those caveats: In the Standard Model, the way it is usually written down, elementary particles are excitations of fields. They carry theoretical labels  which distinuish them (which field it is, and in what state precisely). Energy is a secondary property which can be assigned to field configurations, among others such as momentum, charge, etc., and isolated particles correspond to field configurations with certain discrete energy quantities corresponding to their mass via mc^2. In this picture, elem. particles are not containers of energy, but neither would one say they are Energy itself.
One might hoewever be able to simply adopt the speech convention that everything is Energy, and that this Energy can be stored in different fields, or, equivalenty, be assigned different labels.

But I don't feel comfortable giving Energy such a fundamental role.

There seem to be different schools of thought, with some wanting to make a cut-and-dried difference between matter and energy and some wanting to say that matter is energy. I was in this later school until I looked into QM and learned that fermions=matter while bosons=energy (thus my original question). Despite your caveats, wouldn't you shrink from saying that what we see through a microscope or nanoscope is just as subject to cherry picking as the Bible? We cannot approach the phenomenal world without a paradigm or describe what we find there in a way that is independent from language. At least, we have yet to find a way to do these things.

Well, at least the gods of QM aren't going to send anyone to hell (unless there are people on Earth when the sun goes nova).