Holy crap everything you were saying was hitting word chords in me, so relatable, then you said Monticello. I just moved to Earl Park, was going to have to decide between Century Link and satellite, then Mainstream came through like a week before I closed on the house and installed cheap fast fiber.
I went on a deployment, got a nice gaming laptop for that. When I got home back to my desktop, I basically had no need for it so I hooked it up to my living room TV. At first I just played some controller friendly games on it, but now I use it as the entire media center with Stremio and qbittorrent and the likes. I use unified remote to have my phone as the remote.