"But the biggest pain point remains the whole NFS mess" That's a little unfair. NFS has been around for a very long time and yet it is still modern and being

"But the biggest pain point remains the whole NFS mess" That's a little unfair. NFS has been around for a very long time and yet it is still modern and being developed. You do have to do things the Unix way to get the most out of it, so you need to get Unix uid/gid standardised across your network for example. Samba's winbind and the rid backend to idmap is a rather easy way to turn AD users into full Unix users with consistent uid/gid. If you get your time, DNS and user IDs right then NFS can be pretty easy and very, very reliable. On modern Unix systems, you also have Samba to play with and other things. Lots of choice and with a bit of thought and research, you will find a decent solution.