So for the past decade or so I've had an HTPC with a Ceton CableCARD and extenders over my house, enjoying a blissful unified DVR experience on Windows Media Center.

As my dislike of Comcast (and the size of my bill) continued to grow and this system has been put on life support by Microsoft, and with the availability of fiber Internet in my area, I'm trying to cut the cord and move to a pure Internet streaming solution.

The problem is, so far, the experience has been entirely inferior to my HTPC. My main complaints:

• I cannot get full coverage of channels with a single service. Right now I'm looking at combining Philo TV and either YouTube TV or PS Vue to get sufficient coverage. (Fubo TV is closer but still misses out on key channels I like, also I don't give a damn about sports and their experience seems mostly centered around that.)
• The remotes for these devices suck for DVR-oriented couch surfing. I bought both a Roku Ultra and a FireTV 4K Stick. I generally cannot page up and down while viewing the guide. I can't channel up or down to couch surf. I can't jump to the previous channel, or dial a channel number in. There's no record button for the DVR functionality. I even tried syncing my Harmony remote and most buttons simply don't exist.
• The cloud DVRs generally don't let you record either single episodes or specify that you only want to record new episodes. The view doesn't make it especially clear how many episodes of a thing you've recorded and have yet to watch. It wasn't really designed with having a "backlog" in mind. (Also not crazy that you can't hold onto recordings past 30 days/90 days whatever.)

Is there any advice to make cutting the cord a less painful experience for folks who genuinely like to couch surf?

What I really wish is that I could just receive TV over Internet streams instead of cable/satellite and record them in DVR software to my own hard disk, but it looks like that's not in the cards...