Yeah. The paid product must be superior.
I don't generally pirate games, because in the case of games, the paid product is superior to use. Automatic updates, online functionality, workshop integration etc. All reasons to prefer the paid version on something like Steam to pirating the game.
With a home media setup, you are probably still paying money. You need storage, things like VPN and Usenet subscriptions etc. It's not like I'm using them because they are free. I have spent money on them. I've just spent money on the superior implementation. It became the superior implementation once corporations predictably all wanted a slice of the pie and now my media server is much more enjoyable and easier to manage than 10 different subscription services I need to juggle because no way am I going to pay exorbitant amounts a month for all of them.
Yeah this is my setup. Sure it does mean you have to pay for a couple of things, but I find its the best way. Plug a Usenet provider and a couple of indexers into the aars, set it as highest priority, then some decent torrent trackers as lower prio.
Usenet will handle grabbing the majority of your requests without having to worry about seeding, ratio and such and the torrent trackers act as a fallback and for stuff like season packs which don't tend to get uploaded to Usenet and anything older or rarer that might not be available on usenet. So far though I've found it's not too much that doesn't get grabbed by usenet, but the torrent trackers are a nice backup.