Moving away from Synology as a NAS in 2025

I've been holding out for quite awhile on upgrading my storage, coming from a full DS920+ and looking at upgrading to a rack mounted NAS, I think I've come to the conclusion that it's better to purchase a cheaper Synology DS device and connect it via a high speed backbone to a larger and cheaper NAS. The real instigator for me was discovering the new Ubiquiti NAS - 8 bays for 500$ and an SFP+ 10 gigabit interface compared to say the RS1221+ for 1400$. Ubiquiti also has easy to manage prosumer web interfaces and apps for their products.

Considering that Synology isn't upgrading their hardware very frequently and they've switched away from the Celeron to processors without hardware transcoding, I'm seeing less of a reason to pay the Synology tax on bigger devices when I could get the best of both worlds with a smaller controller node a separate storage node.

Has anyone else looked at running a separate NAS device or feels that Synology is not staying competitive at their current price point?