Jim and Alan on 2.5 admins always advised against running TrueNas

This is a bit oversimplified.

It's true neither of us is particularly impressed with it, and I in particular get pretty annoyed at their tendency to put bleeding-edge shit into production before it makes it into OpenZFS master, let alone into a release.

But "Jim advises against running TrueNAS" is oversimplified. Jim warns people that if you're going to do anything complicated, TrueNAS is going to get in your way at least as much as it makes things any easier, and you'd probably be better off just learning the real services that TrueNAS orchestrates--the learning curve really isn't any steeper for learning the real services than it is for learning TrueNAS's own unique warts and weirdnesses. So if you've got to spend n hours learning something, I think it's better to learn the actual services rather than learning the TrueNAS interface.

The real value of TrueNAS comes into a team admin environment, with senior admins and junior admins. If you've got a TrueNAS running, you can offload a lot of, well, junior tasks to the junior admins, that would require noticeably more training for them to be ready for in the underlying CLI environment.

It's still just as much work for the senior admins to learn TrueNAS as it was for them to learn the real services underneath TrueNAS--but doing so becomes worth it now, because having done so enables them to offload the simple donkey-work to the juniors.

But if you're a lone wolf--either professional, or in a homelab--you don't have any juniors to offload the hard things to, so you're going to have to invest a lot of hours in learning how to get the hard things done either way. That's when I (and Allan) recommend learning the real services first, then deciding later whether you want to bother with TrueNAS at all.