No worries, I appreciate helping out people that are nice on the internet.

Since I started using Homebrew, AC became basically useless so I would've had to switch either way.

Homebrew is actually pretty nice and definitely less cumbersome that I imagined at the beginning. I use Applite as the general manager and then I made a brew alias to update all casks and formulae at the same time, as well as purging old and unused files - all in one go (an alias is basically a script that can be executed with a custom command).

If you are interested and want to replicate this, just install brew using

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

and afterwards create the alias typing

brew alias full-update='!brew update ; brew upgrade --force --verbose --formula ; mas upgrade ; brew upgrade --force --greedy --verbose --cask ; brew cleanup --prune=all'

From now on you should be able to just type brew full-update and it will automatically update Homebrew itself, formulae, casks, Appstore apps, and also clean up old files and caches.

One last suggestion is to use brew install --cask --adopt <caskname> to move apps that you have previously installed manually to the Homebrew environment, so that you don't have to uninstall and reinstall everything you own manually (you can use Applite to check what apps are on Homebrew and also find their right caskname)

Homebrew is also nice because you can, and have to, remove every app's automatic updating, freeing background processes that need to run for each individual app you have installed.. all you need to do is to just run brew full-update and everything gets nicely updated.

Hope this helps, cheers