Time Machine on Mac rant

Over the last couple of months I've been noticing my NAS (Synology DS916+) constantly churning drives. I didn't like this as a) there was no process I was aware of that should be doing this (so maybe some misconfigured or even malware type issue); b) I just had to replace a couple of HDs and don't really want unnecessary wear and tear, obviously.

Long story short, after cutting down on some other processes (mainly the Synology antivirus taking several days for weekly scans, and disabling that), the disks are still going at it nearly constantly. The only process left now is AFP/afpd - the Apple Filing Protocol. I have a Mac Mini that I use for a few specific things (music stuff mainly)... and I finally figured out that it's Time Machine doing the constant access because it's configured by default to do a backup Every Single Hour. Poking further I found the system config file with the interval defining this, and tried to change it to once a day. Nope, can't edit the file. No permissions from Admin account. Can't even give myself permissions. So the only choice was to just completely turn off automatic TM backups.

WTF Apple? Who the hell wants to have either no backups or backups every freaking hour - that oh by the way will continue to accrue until your target backup drive is filled.