This is great. If you ever wrote about your entire setup I'd love to read it. Got a few new ideas from your post. To anyone reading, the most helpful tool for setting up my homelab is the community helper-scripts (formerly tteck, RIP). Those have saved me soooo much time, and showed me best practices in setup, and the list of scripts give you a good idea of tools that are commonly used.
I have drafts for it but maybe I shouldn't have made this comment under my anonymous account lol.
I'm a firm believer that tools should be made to be usable by both technical and nontechnical people. Usually we do one or the other but it's a false dichotomy. "For the noobs" pushes for sane defaults, reduced complexity, and fixing bugs. It's also an entry point to become a power user, especially as being a power user in one domain doesn't mean you're automatically in another. "For the power users" gives flexibility, helps fix bugs (faster and higher coverage), as well as is critical for feature development (unless you naively believe you can know everything your diverse users need and have an infinite budget), and evangelize your product. The magic of success requires having both but I think we pretend it is one or the other. It needs to work well and be pretty.