I do enjoy diving into these kinds of topics, but I also like to fully understand what I’m doing — and so far, all of this has been completely new territory for me after 15 years of working with VMware.
Understandable for me it's the opposite: Linux is my main driver for 15 years at least, I maintain Linux servers for a living for a decade now (if you include student jobs). In the last years it happened that my work notebook runs on Windows and i also need to maintain some Windows servers. For them I have similiar reaction like yours "why is this all so complicated and not working as I expect". Guess this is just normal if you need to learn some new tricks.
As mentioned, we have support, and I plan to contact Proxmox on Monday to ask what they think is the best approach for our environment. I’ll explain our sup, and then they can tell me whether I should continue as I am or convert everything to RAW.
Sounds like a plan. If you don't mind could you share their recommendation and your course of action afterwards? This might be of interest for other people with similiar setups and environments like yours.