it required me to leave my laptop running at all times or buy a dedicated pc for it.

Yeah, that's not exactly a software issue ... you can't stream data out of thin air.

find it infinitely easier to just Pirate what I want and put it on a usb stick or hdmi the laptop to the tv.

That's pretty cute, but get's kind of tedious when you have thousands of movies and tens-of-thousand TV show episodes. That's when you'll see the need for a software like plex.