I, and I assume everyone on this forum who has one, paid around 50-100€ for their lifetime pass. My hardware encoding works great and doesn't need me to tell it about each and ever codec in existence and how to handle each one.
The new price is insane, but that was not the topic of this thread.
A reverse proxy does not add any security compared to opening a port. A VPN is the recommended solution (even by the devs themselves) because you do not want the public Internet to be able to access your Jellyfin server, its as open as a barn door
A reverse proxy does not add any security compared to opening a port, it just makes it easier to access the service using a URL.
A VPN is the only sensible way a Jellyfin instance should be exposed to the internet
I have it running in parallel with Plex to keep an eye on its progress. There is a lot of things that do not just work. Hardware Encoding for example, or safe remote access
I couldn't care less about the client design, since you have free choice there. If only the devs could be arsed to fix the issues that prevent me from just putting it behind a reverse proxy. If I could let people use it without exposing what is essentially an open door or forcing them to install a vpn, I would probably do that and slowly ween off Plex
Schinken!