Some people prefer the thumbnail look of plex, netflix, hulu, etc. I prefer to just scroll down to the folder of my unwatched stuff or the entire season or entire run of a show and watch it that way. Plus because it’s vlc pulling via smb from my local nas, it’s faster to stream and doesn’t need to be encoded to be played. There virtually nothing that vlc can’t play.
As for the shield. There is supposedly a new one coming at some point, I’ll probably wait until then to grab one. They are in the $200 range so no need to be quick on the draw grabbing what is aging a bit hardware wise.