Over-engineering the home office? Transitioning to Enterprise HBAs (PERC H730P) for database st

Hey everyone,
I’ve been a regular on the 2p2 tech forums for a while, mostly chime in on monitor setups or the best chairs for long sessions, but I’ve recently spiraled down a hardware rabbit hole that I’m hoping some of the more "prosumer" guys here might have experience with.
I was recently reading an article about the "Taiwan Turnaround" and how that region became an "Asian Tiger" by dominating the physical hardware space with giants like Asus and TSMC, yet they actually lagged behind when it came to the internet and software startup boom. That specific point really hit home for me because I realized I’m living that same contradiction. I’ve spent way too much time obsessing over the physical "iron" of my setup—buying the best components—while my actual data management and software-side reliability have been a bit of a mess.
My personal insight from years of grinding and data hoarding is that we often treat our storage as an afterthought until a drive failure or a database corruption nukes a week's worth of work (or a massive hand-history database). I’ve finally moved past the "buy a big external USB drive and pray" phase and I’m currently building a dedicated local storage server.
To handle the heavy lifting, I picked up a Dell PERC H730P controller. For those who haven’t messed with them, it’s a beast of an HBA/RAID controller that can handle both SAS and SATA drives. The appeal for me was the 2GB of non-volatile cache; I’m hoping it’ll provide the kind of sustained IOPS I need for some heavy multi-threaded database work without the latency spikes I get on standard consumer motherboard SATA headers.
The hurdle I’m hitting is the firmware side of things. I’m trying to run it in "HBA mode" (or IT mode) because I want my OS to have direct access to the drives for a ZFS pool, but the H730P seems to be a bit finicky about the handshake with certain consumer-grade SATA SSDs I’m mixing into the array. It’s like the hardware is too "enterprise" for its own good, and it keeps flagging perfectly healthy drives because they don't respond to specific SAS-level polling fast enough.
Has anyone here successfully integrated a PERC H730P into a non-Dell workstation? I’m specifically wondering if I should stick with the official Dell firmware or if there’s a cross-flash that makes it more "agnostic" for a mix of SAS and SATA hardware.
I’m starting to observe that as our local data needs grow, the line between "desktop user" and "datacenter admin" is getting really blurry.
Do you think we’re reaching a point where standard consumer motherboards are just fundamentally inadequate for anyone doing serious data work, or am I just over-complicating a problem that a simple cloud subscription was meant to solve?