re: Critique my ideal home network setup

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I don't know if this new set up will really uncomplicated things that much.

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You're right. The Samsung box is probably overkill and, while in theory making it an easier frontend, the lack of DVR feature makes the whole system still rely on too many devices. But the addition of the HDHomerun Prime and a new, high-powered computer to re- and decode the files and be a NAS/media/backup server are at least no more complicated. In Media Center, you can set network shares to appear in the "videos" or even "recorded TV" folders, all accessible by the same remote control that accesses live TV via the HDHomerun, compressed video from the server, uncompressed video on the desktop, music stored anywhere on the network, photos from anywhere on the network...It's very much a prettier version of iTunes with better file support (and I would say an easier/better remote control interface) + the addition of live TV.

So in terms of how complicated it is to set up,
1) 15 minutes on the phone with Cox and 2 wires for 3 TV tuners with full access to every non-OnDemand channel you subscribe to
2) one program on the HTPC that looks for files in a folder and moves them to a folder on the server
3) the same program on the server finds the files and recodes them to 10% of their original size or so, has commercial-skipping software built in for free, renames the files based on whatever naming convention you want (s01e01HowIMetYourMother for example would be "season 1, episode 1"...there are many other conventions you can use for this as options already built in on MCEBuddy. It also correctly identifies and places the .wtv (proprietary recording type of file from Windows Media Center) metadata into corresponding appropriate places in the output file type so that the show can be displayed with its title and such when you're viewing it, and you don't just see "s01e01showname" as your only descriptor of what's inside.
4) Then you go into the HTPC and add the folder that you're dumping the output files from the server into to the directory from within media center (it's fully browse-able and takes about 6 mouse clicks)

From there, the HTPC "sees" all of the coded video files. It's less than 5 minutes of actually setting up to connect an HTPC with Windows Media Center to a backend video server. And it's probably about 15 minutes to set up the input/output on both computers and recoding parameters. Tweaking it will take considerably longer, but only because that requires a 5GB input file to be compressed down to 350-500MB + going back and watching the original 30-minute (minus commercials now!) video. The actual tweaking is quite simple and often not required.