Have you told this story anywhere else already? I'd love to read it. In a past life I worked very close to Windows Server, but I mostly selfhost Linux at home now.
What is it mostly identity related? I miss AD sometimes...or maybe storage? The SMB stack is pretty good too.
after booting windows looked at the disk layout and asked me what I planned to do. It suggested some quick options, one of which was exactly what I planned to do (raid the spindle pair, and raid the SSD pair) and one even better (create a volume putting the SSD and spindle together, and then raid that.)
Yes thanks I said, and it did everything. By contrast setting up raid on the previous Linux box, albeit 5 years earlier) took days of searching for docs, specific magic incantations on the command line, and lots of rebooting.
So yes, I get the freedom thing, but sometimes a computer is just a tool, and I want it to just work.
Even the incantation to do it manually isn't that magic. I'm guessing you could read the manual for the options to mdadm --create in minuted rather than days. If you want to be really fancy zpool create mirror foo mirror bar.