> led to me thinking more critically about what I want to spend time downloading and watching rather than just flipping mindlessly through endless amounts of readily available garbage

For me it's a bit different. I have the *arr stack fully automated (with 22Tb of storage for now maaaaybe it's overkill), for friends and family too.

And the experience is nice because it makes content "crowd sourced". If something is on the server it means someone else purposefully added it, so you can still browse, but it's curated based on your friend/family circle.

But also the automation part can be a bit "mindlessly click download on everything even stuff I probably won't watch", but disk space constraints force you to delete it if nobody's watching.

Radarr and Sonarr are my two favourite pieces of software ever. Together with Plex I get an experience FAR superior to any streaming service. For the record I would be happy to pay for such a service, but they're so greedy they'll never offer such a unified service. Instead they keep making the direct to Netflix content worse. Removing content without any notice. Making the app UX worse, including removing useful reviews from the platform, and making content auto play when browsing. The best example of this clusterfuck is the Pokemon where to watch guide: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...