First of all ignore the trends. Fuck docker, fuck nixos, fuck terraform or whatever tech stack gets shilled constantly.
Find a tech stack that is easy FOR YOU and settle on that. I haven't changed technologies for 4 years now and feel like everything can fit in my head.
Second of all, look at the other people using commercial services and see how stressed they are. Google banned my account, youtube has ads all the time, the app for service X changed and it's unusable and so on.
Nothing comes for free in terms of time and mental baggage
In the past I used airsonic. It has the best support for different music files and good support for albums ripped as single track, like most classical releases.
The problem with airsonic and its protocol is the lack of good android clients.
If you need to listen through the phone for most of the time, go with jellyfin + finamp. Otherwise try airsonic + its web ui.
Are those your own blurays? Then share them before compressing.
Transcoding is hard. There is no way that your transcoding settings are going to be a one size fits all. I am currently encoding the famous iKaos Dragonball release and I did 48 samples before deciding what configuration to use.
You are better off downloading stuff from torrent, especially for newer media. You'll find a community that put 100x your time collectively on transcoding. That will also save from your tremendous electricity costs.
Also look into vmaf for quality metrics. Consider that switching to uncompressed 1080 might bring you close to your goal with very very low effort.