Re: Anything is better than WD Home. By default
I'm dumping a fairly new Synology for about the same reasons - and it wasn't cheap. If you are a fit to the brain-dead anticipated use-case, it's fine, even really good. Else, you're bascially hosed re configurability, even if, lile myself, you're pretty good with linux for the last couple decades.
I tried open media vault and it's almost as bad. Haven't gotten around to trying FreeNAS, a very graybeard friend who used to sysadmin Unix likes it, but even his own RCS scripts wouldn't run on it.
Being off grid on solar, I don't have much in the way of always-on computing and need to think very hard about what those one or two can do for me....
I've wound up with a HardKernel HC2 (actually, several of them) which I set up using an Odroid xu4 since that has a video output etc, making it easy - running plain old linux, all the usual suspects, I can run my own code, run VNC, webmin, mysql, nginx, cron jobs, and whatever else you could do with linux. Draws 3 watts spun down, and beating the crap out of a 4tb nas drive draws 12w while saturating a GbE link.
Too bad you have to build that yourself...
WD isn't alone. There are reasons, I won't say great ones, but they exist. It's well known that the more knobs you put on a thing, the more people wil misadjust them and then complain and eat your support resources...
But this goes back to good software design principles from the old days. Make it easy for new users to make it work at all - reasonable defaults - but don't prevent the experienced users from getting what they want. That's a little harder, so in todays "ship it now and don't fix it later" world...we don't do that anymore.