@jwildeboer This is a nice idea, indeed!
I started in the 1990s, so I pretty much had to set up everything the hard way, but even the hard way was much easier back then. I still run my own email server, because adding the complexity step by step was manageable, but I don't think I could start from scratch today.
I never realized how much of my independence can be attributed to controlling my own DNS and not to running my own services.