Thin skinned? You should definitely get to know me. I'm very thick skinned and I don't put up with dumb stuff in the forums(not that I'm implying you've done dumb stuff). I just have better things to do with my time than argue over alot of the stupid stuff. When I am very bored or feel like teaching someone that probably shouldn't even be working in IT something I'll write a long post.
There's a reason us mods have created all the stickies we have. We're all volunteers. We don't get paid to do this stuff. We don't bother fighting people that want to do stupid stuff(again, not implying you fall into that category). My time is worth too much to me to sit and go through an argument on forums over it. If %randomuser% wants to go do everything we tell you not to do in the forums, have a ball. Don't be upset when you lose your data. We tried to warn you. You can only lead a horse to water. If you don't want to drink, then fine. But if you die of dehydration don't come crying in the forum. We definitely don't do sympathy here. Just look at the threads of people that do several very very stupid things. They quite often get zero responses despite at least 2-3 mods reading every single post in the forum. I have no guilt about closing a tab on my browser when someone tells use they used non-ECC RAM, virtualized FreeNAS with RDMs, and their pool that isn't backed up won't mount and the entire company is at stand-still and the business will go bankrupt if they don't get it back up and recover all of the data. I know that all of the other mods kind of have the same attitude. It's obvious without discussion when those threads get zero responses but have 30+ reads.
In your case, I can't help you with your issue except to say to go to CIFS. I've said it. You've provided reasons to not use it. Those choices aren't valid arguments in my opinion, but that doesn't invalidate your choice or argument. It's your choice to make and as the administrator for your server, you've made it. Unfortunately, there's almost always a tradeoff when you have different options. If it wasn't a tradeoff the choice would be clear to everyone and the other choices would fade into the sunset.