I was really just using SMB for convenience sake, one less protocol for me to turn on and configure. I initially thought about NFS but when I realized how little I know about actually securing NFS I decided against it. Though, I suppose that's led me to this point here.
Trying it stock is exactly what I was thinking, though what folks have said about NixOS makes me think that's going to be the first thing I try.
Very first experience was NC-Pi, right before that project got canned. Loved it so much I spent a couple hundred on shared hosting and set v24 up there, but I've been trying to move to my homelab because A) One less bill B) I can use the 72TB RAID Array for storage instead of the 30GB storage I paid way too much for.
Honestly have had great experiences with Portainer so far, with Nextcloud being the only real exception. PiHole, Dashy, an introducer for Syncthing, and StashApp all run without a hitch via Compose files dropped into Portainer. Though I am definitely going to take Docker out of the picture for the next NC install which means taking Portainer out as well.