Haha. This is the way. For real though, just go with what you’re comfortable with in both time and headache. You know UNRAID and it worked for you in the past. Keep that as your prod box and then scrap together a lab, which you already have the makings of. Proxmox is excellent but without two hosts and shared storage it’s not really any net gain for you, it seems, vs running something you are comfortable with (UNRAID).

EDIT: INB4 someone gets sassy — HA is only “supported” with a minimum of 3 hosts. But it works just fine with 2 and a third host (raspberry pi or VM running outside the cluster) using qdevice.

My femboy, just switch back to UNRAID. You like it, are familiar with it, and it does run very well. It’s also pretty stable and extremely user friendly. TrueNAS can be installed as a VM and you can play around with it and learn the ins/outs. I wouldn’t concern yourself with Proxmox as the ease of “reduced upheaval” needs shared storage which all your storage is living in the box and therefore not shared. Make your life easier and just go with what you know and like.