A different perspective:

I run a syno box and I have been learning quite a bit; driven recently by docker and ngix, basically. It removes the daunting 'everything in *nix is commands in a terminal' and gives me this nice UI and bumpers so I don't royally fuck myself (at least not without warnings and scary red icons telling me beforehand).

The hardware is meh and the upcharge is yikes but it's kept my data safe while I screw around "in prod"; and when I do actually mess up, the backup system is easy enough to use and recovery saves my skin in just a few minutes (snapshots too, super convenient). That's what I want - a touch of guidance (so those changes at 4am where I skim the docs and get a warning about a dangerous command making me double-check before execution), a simple UI for system things (backups, control panel, user account access...), but the ability to venture beyond their little garden. Training wheels to be fast, loose, a bit reckless - but still safe.

Funny enough, I was looking at unraid for a replacement/transition not even a week ago. But I figured that there wasn't a compelling reason to switch (the website is barren for actual feature information), and figured I'll upgrade to a new syno box in a couple years instead. This unraid news is concerning but at least I get to watch what happens from the outside looking in, see how it goes.