I know others pointed to it a way to partly do this, but I wanted to just say that I don't replicate mine on purpose at this point. The one running on my Pi updates automatically and the other one does not. That allows me to test new releases on one DNS without borking my whole setup. Then I update the other manually once I know the Pi is working fine.

Another vote for Technitium DNS. I used PiHole then Adguard Home and Technitium is much better for me. I actually run two of them so I never have more than one down outside of power outages. One on my Pi and one on my server that runs my Docker containers for my other services.

I don't think you get what FTP is and isn't. FTP and the actually secure flavors of it are just the protocol used to move the files back and forth. Nextcloud, Google Cloud, DropBox, etc do a lot of other things on top of the protocol they use to move files. If you can find an FTP client that does all of the version control, conflict resolution, automation, etc that you get from Nextcloud and others then by all means use it if you want. But there is a reason that is almost non-existent while NextCloud and other programs actually do that stuff.

I actually used to use SFTP to move files back and forth between my laptop and desktop back in the day. Other and better tools have taken the place of it.

I haven't found one that did not require something like Tiller to create spreadsheets you can then import. I work with a lot of bank API in my professional life and they are very picky about who gets access directly to their API. I find it very doubtful anything open source would be able to do much without doing something like html screen scraping and that would severely limit how many banks would be usable as well as ensure it broke every time the html changed.

Same here. I wanted a simple view more like a recipe book and Mealie hits that right out of the park. I am running the omni-nightly in docker though which had an update 2 months ago vs the 2 years for the normal latest.

I started just for funsies, and in the end narrowed it down to just those items that make life better for us. Primarily, I run 2 Technitium DNS (network wide ad blocking), Jellyfin (for media), Home Assistant (to control lights and other devices without internet access), Mealie (recipes), and Ubooquity (books and comics). I have run NextCloud, among other services, but none of them got enough use to make it worth it to continue.