> The docs on how to do simple things seem to be nonexistant because they don't want to be sued and shutdown entirely.
What docs are you looking for? They have a very extensive wiki as well as an active community on their own forum.
I’ve ran it on all kinds of hardware from laptops, Android phones and tablets, Raspberry Pis (version 1 through to 3), Intel NUCs, etc. And obviously not forgetting the Xbox. Until very recently it was my go to media center.
I even went as far as to write some plugins for it. But they were for version 8 or something. It was probably 10 years ago and hasn’t been maintained.
I’ve never used a media center - free or non-free - that was as easy to set up nor ran as flawlessly as XBMC / Kodi did
Besides, non-technical users wouldn't be ripping DVDs to a NFS / SMB share in the first place (or using a home server / NAS for bittorrent / usenet / etc if that's how one prefers to accumulate their video archive). So why would they want a Media Centre that's designed for playing local or networked content?
Maybe what you're referring to is the stuff that has been in press a lot in recent years; the stuff incorrectly named (imo) as "Kodi-boxes" (or similar). I say "incorrectly named" because they used 3rd party plugins for illegal streams but those really have naff all to do with the Kodi media centre itself. It's like calling illegal downloading "Windows-boxes" because someone uses a bittorrent client on Windows 10.
I guess you could argue that Kodi now fills a niche that is dying out - that's certainly the case for me as I tend to use Netflix et al on my smart TV. But for playing local / mountable files, Kodi still leads the pack in terms of ease. Which is hardly surprising when you consider that's what the media centre was built to do.
iPhone (running MrMC) Apple TV (MrMC) but MrMC hasn't been updated to the latest Kodi yet so I can't use those in a shared env.