I'd be interested to see how this performs on one of the older desktops I have laying around. I've been running Fedora on my main desktop for quite some time and I have been extremely impressed with gaming performance through Proton. I'd like to see multimedia vendors support the platform so it could truly replace the aging consoles/Rokus in my home I use only for Plex/Hulu/Netflix.
Why on earth are you not utilizing chocolatey [https://chocolatey.org/] or using a slip-streamed ISO? I agree it's a pain, but if you are going to install an operating system from 2009, you're going to have to be willing to wrangle it into modern application.