I’m just rewriting everything in Ansible and I think is worth the effort, it’s self-documented and as an added bonus I won’t have to keep backups of the whole VMs, just the ZFS pool with the data/databases.

This might not work for you, but at one point I had three HDDs running all the time in my small apartment. What I did to keep my sanity was set up a schedule in qBittorrent so that it completely stopped at night and used most of my bandwidth the rest of the day. I also recommend setting up permanent seeding with Hardlinks and auto-deletion when it reaches a certain ratio (this may differ based on how popular your torrents are). In my case, it was 10:1.

Based on the TRaSH Guides, x264 is better for 1080p content and x265 is only worth it for 2160p and above. But I don’t know how they would compare in the case of 720p x264 vs 1080p x265. I think I would prefer 720p x264 if it had a higher bit rate.