When effort is required is as important as how much effort is required. Sure, if I want to watch something on my Plex server I have to have put the content on the server in the first place, but I can do that at my leisure. When I want to watch that content, it’s there, and I don’t have to spend 10 minutes with my dinner getting cold while I try to find the thing I want to watch.

Like I said, the original goal was to have something to stream old movies. There is no service I could reliably find things pre-1970, especially the cardboard era of special effects. I'm a huge fan of the hammer horror films and every now and again I'll want to watch Mothra or Metropolis. Good luck finding anywhere to stream them outside of the "watch x online" sites which generally have poor quality or are mislabeled.

The torrenting features were tacked on later, and honestly I don't think it was much work at all. Setting up a proxy credit card just to sign up for another subscription service is more annoying to me than playing with server gear for a weekend.