HW Accel took me 5 min of reading the docs one time several years ago (when I first did the setup several upgrades ago), and has not been an issue since.

You are making some statements about how rough Jellyfin is, you should remember the bolded words from the quote below more often.

Jellyfin Hardware encoding for me has been so much tinkering with so little success and even then it only worked for a short while or only a small subset of my library.

You seem happy with Plex, and that's just fine, but all the experiences you've related here about Jellyfin are different than mine, and different than what I typically hear from anyone else who runs Jellyfin in recent years. I was a Plex early-adopter who left Plex for Jellfyin when Jellyfin was barely a year old, and really was still rough around the edges. I still had less trouble then than you are portraying.

My non-techie wife, my teenaged son, and my youngest son with special needs all use it without issue across multiple devices.

I guess I'm in the "Jellyfin fanclub."

When you say "hardware encoding", are you talking about using your GPU for stuff like transcoding when streaming to devices?

I ask because I actively disable all transcoding because I run jellyfin off my laptop and don't wanna overwork it so to speak. I just assumed it was using the GPU.