1. First was a Keurig fan, until I went through so many keurig pods in a day it got nauseating. Also all that plastic waste didn't sit well with me. Even tried filling a refillable keurig pod for a while, but then that got tedious with all the cleaning. The machines always start leaking eventually. And the coffee never tasted very good, even with fresh ground.
I started with the bar low. Post-post wwII England was still mostly tea and coffee was *gasp* instant. Load it up with sugar and milk and you can about drink it (I now drink plain black coffee - excepting cappuccinos). When I was a kid, we visited the US and my parents brought back a coffee maker and would use it occasionally for a treat until it burned out and temporarily became a teleporter for Star Wars figures.
After that, it was drip coffee for a while but a whole pot is often a waste and gets burned quickly. Senseo had an offer on their machines so I rocked one of those for many years. Bagged ground coffee has all the disadvantages you've heard about but it's definitely a few steps up from instant and it's at least a fresh cup every time.
I've tried french press, those Italian pots (bough mine in Italy), a little Espresso machine. I even have a glass vacuum brewer but I just don't have the patience for them. I used a superauto at a hotel in the Czech republic that gave me the kind of cappuccino I was looking for and started looking after that. That machine came out somewhere around $3500 so a bit rich but I saw there was a sale on the Philips on Amazon and BB was price matching... My first machine arrived crushed in the post. I was so excited then bits started coming off in my hands... I drove 40 miles to exchange it that night.
Though at first I thought I had gotten a defective machine, because I didn't know that you are supposed to toss the first 3-4 cups it makes while it initializes and calibrates (I thought, wow, this coffee is so weak and diluted, is something wrong here? Lol). But after that it got really great. Also I agree with you about the cleaning regimen, I do a complete machine cleaning every 3-4 months. But so worth it.
Fortunately, I had read about that in my research so knew to expect and just blasted a whole bunch of cups through. It still wasn't perfect but it didn't take long to get to where it's good. I usually go for Lavazza Espresso beans. It's that good that my wife is now a coffee drinker where she wasn't before.