Another vote for Thunder, though I’m also kind of warming up to Summit.

“How long it takes to do a cycle” is dependent on the mode and settings you pick. Congrats on your streamlined existence, though.

I think that you and I are roughly of the same temperament when it comes to what we expect of devices. But can you really imagine

ZERO logical reasons

that anyone might want to? Like getting an alert when their stuff is done?

My, that’s a nice tnetennba.

Federating with another instance essentially means caching/rehosting their content, so it’s easy to see why some instance hosts may not want to deal with that from particular instances. As others have said, you can join an instance that’s more open to everything, or just host your own.