nicinabox - i'm not sure what it is about boiler and the other tools you have developed, but they seem intimidating for some reason. your ideas are great and i was super excited about all of them when you announced them, including the Web GUI and boiler, but for some reason it feels like there is a barrier to entry that I think most users are not willing to go through. I think if you unified your GUI and package/plugin manager (which should run from the GUI primarily), you'd really make some progress. The lack of plugins availability is an issue too - it's a chicken and egg thing.
Agree that limetech picking and recommending one solution would go a long way. For some reason, Tom seems to want to reinvent the wheel and only allow himself to develop anything official for unraid (see the webgui on github, which is a stripped down version of simplefeatures it seems).