Simple bank is ending bill payments, going back to paper checks

This is asinine. So now you need to either need to write paper checks or have a biller just take your cash out of your account. A bank account is not a credit card. I do not want to authorise billers to just take money out of my account.

A bank account should be push and pull not only pull.

FYI, many credit cards companies will punish you if a bill pull payment fails by going to the maximum interest rate even if the failure is a technical issue.