[baobabKoodaa]

> As long as you set up everything correctly it's fairly pain-free

This is not true. Maybe you got it working for you (or maybe you never really measured your deliverability), but as a general advice that's just wrong. I've run my own email server for years and I've found it extremely difficult to get deliverability to Outlook and Gmail. You won't even get access to their deliverability debugging tools unless you send large volumes of email. Perversely, a small-volume sender is more likely to be classified as spam than a large-volume sender.