I've been lazier - I've just been buying ~$120 "Minisforum" PC's (4 now, for various people I've set them up for). They work great, but their CPU performance compared to the i5-6500T leaves a lot to be desired (1000/1400 vs 1800/4800 single/multi). They still kick a Pi's butt, and they are x86 which makes lots of things easier.

My main hesitation with buying the used USFF has been the Intel Graphics generations - I don't know enough about it, but I do use my mini PC for Plex, and have a hard time comparing the integrated graphics, which is critical. These N4000 destroy the i5-3450 I have in my NAS. It was cheaper to buy an N4000 and put Plex on it over network access, than it was to completely upgrade my NAS to a new generation of hardware, and the newer QuickSync version can actually encode with Plex.