I find the PlutoTV app to also be much more user-friendly and reliable than Paramount Plus. I would rather be able to have everything on demand and pay Paramount, but the Paramount Plus app is so buggy on my Smart TV and on Kodi that I’ve given up.
The last straw was when I was actually contemplating writing a script to automatically restart Kodi because of how often Paramount Plus dies on Kodi.
I agree with you that it’s nice in a way not even having to think about what to watch next. If something really bad comes on, like that pretty racist TNG episode from season 1 or the Voyage lizard episode, it’s a lot easier to just switch from the Star Trek to the More Trek channel, or vice versa, and be done with it.
I actually don’t mind the Pluto ads. If you put Trek on in the background while working, I think you’ll find that they’re so repetitive yet non-annoying that you just mentally block them out.