A little of both. I think it’s good for software to be customizable, but layering on plugins often tends to lead to instability or other issues, so the ideal for me is where the program does 90% or more of what I want out of the box, and plugins fill the gaps.
So, yes, you’re basically correct.
There are search layers that remove the need to access radarr / sonarr directly when searching for shows (someone mentioned jellyseer, for example), so that part of the process can be streamlined, and once you’re watching a show it’s generally very good at pulling new episodes as soon as they’re available, so you’re typically, at most, a day behind actual airing dates. But if you’re trying to just bounce around and try a bunch of different shows it wouldn’t be the best for that. The biggest constraint is generally the speed of your internet and the popularity of what you’re watching. With a high speed connection and a well seeded torrent it’s often only a a couple of minutes to download a pilot episode, and you could have the whole season done by the time you finish watching that.
The other question is one of storage. If you’ve got plenty of hard disk space then you can probably afford to just throw anything that sounds interesting on your pull queue and work your way through it when you actually have time to sit down and watch. Basically you sort of pre-emptively build your “Netflix at home” library and then do your bouncing around channel hopping stuff with the five or so vaguely interesting shows that you added while you were at work.
Is it a replacement for Netflix et al? Not strictly speaking, but if you don’t mind changing up your habits a little it’s probably close enough.
I do, but it’s more out of laziness than anything else. I hate having to remember sixteen different ways of doing things, so I tend to configure all my stuff as identical as reasonably possible. Is this the best way of doing things? Probably not. But it keeps my blood pressure down.
Is this really an issue?
Technically, it’s always been possible to do this with human programmers. I could read the code to Jellyfin, write out a detailed spec, hand that to a software engineer and have them recreate it. Or I could just come up with the same app myself from first principles. In most cases it’s not really that big of a difference when you get down to it.
Arguably, that’s what Emby did to Plex, or what Kodi did to MythTV. How much was inspiration and how much was copying? And does anyone actually care?
At the end of the day, patches and updates to the original won’t work with your clean room implementation, so it’s now on you to maintain this new codebase. And you still have to test it, work the bugs out, solve all the problems, and you can’t just refer back to the original code for solutions because the whole point is that your code still needs to be meaningfully different. You haven’t really removed any of the work of creating a piece of software. If you ended up borrowing certain details of implementation - some clever solutions and novel ideas - from your access to the nuts and bolts details of the original, that’s just part of how open source works.
Clean room implementations are much more of a firmware issue than a software one.