Native vs containerized really depends on what it is going to be doing tbh. If it’s just downloading and/or moving files around, containerized is fine. And having your docker-compose.yml files saved somewhere external will make future hardware upgrades/recovery much easier.

There is certainly some learning curve to figure out the quirks of a compose file, but the nice part is that most services will post an example compose file for you to edit as needed. And that means learning it is basically just a matter of reading the example files and figuring out what the different fields mean; yaml is extremely easy to read, even for someone who has never looked at it before. You may have some fringe cases that need a deeper dive, but the vast majority of setups are basically just a matter of “copy the example compose, edit the volumes as needed, and fuckin send it.”