I ended up on going with TrueNAS Scale. My “old” NAS runs TrueNAS Core and it works great. IX Systems really does make it easy with lots of starting presets for popular use cases. Scale is still a little immature but is finally good enough for me to try.
I really tried to go with Houston UI. I think it’s a great up and coming option, but I couldn’t get past it not supporting (yet) Rocky 9 and Ubuntu 22.04. I still have Houston on Rocky 8 installed on the kingston nvme so I can switch back as needed.
Admittedly, the ZFS Write Errors due to SAS cable issues in my HL15 might be causing some learning fatigue so I’m taking the easier road right now sticking with TrueNAS. 