Warzone 2100 (you can download for free as it is an old PC game that went GPL)

gets more on the nose by the day

That is just the gateway drug to bootstrapping.

Check out https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap

if you want the real hard stuff.

They already did: https://www.commanderx16.com/

you just probably want something better.

and that is the problem building higher performance requires more advanced lithography and that is expensive and until recently was not even an option for a hobbyist (without taking a mortgage on their house).

Given current stagnation, you need only wait about 10 years for that viable option.

rxvt-unicode with tabbedex.

I refuse to use a terminal emulator that needs more than 100MB of RAM to display 80x24 green text on a black display

Raid stopped being optimal now that btrfs and ZFS exist.

If you plan on doing matching drives ZFS is recommended

If you expect mismatched disks, btrfs will work.

If you are most worried about stability get a computer with ECC memory.

If you are most worried about performance, use SSD drives.

If you want a bunch of storage for cheap, use spinning disks (unless you exceed the 100TB capacity range)

Your ZFS backup strategy should be to follow one of the following rulesets:

3-2-1 [3 copies of the data at 2 different locations for the 1 purpose of preserving the data]

4-3-2-1 [4 copies of the data at 3 different locations in 2 different types of media for the 1 purpose of preserving the data]

5-4-3-2-1 [5 copies of the data at 4 different locations across 3 different continents in 2 different types of media for the 1 purpose of preserving the data]

The details of the backup is more if you have a second system to enable ZFS send/receive or if you have to transport deltas from ZFS send

Efficient is sexy