I always get my money's worth from PS essential every year, so I personally can't fault the service.

Glad you're enjoying your PS5. I hope to buy myself a slim soon.

Hope you enjoy your purchase.
It is hard to say PS+ is a scam when the information of what each tier contains is quite easy to get and Sony have said time and again (and criticized for it by xbox fanbase that they don't put their games day one on even the premium tiers).
Regarding the download speed on the cable it works fine for me, but I know not everyone can have their console hooked to ethenert cable.

I really am enjoying it, like I said, from my experience, nobody does single player games as well as Sony (at least for my specific gaming tastes). I still can't believe how good Horizon Zero Dawn (and other PS4 games) looks on the PS5 despite not being a PS5 title. It's not as good as brand-new games, but if someone told me it was a current gen game, I'd totally believe it!

Yeah, I was still quite salty about PS+ not having a lot of the games that multiple websites said were on the top tier service (I guess they meant you could play a long trial if you have it or something). It's not actually a scam, just made me angry that I sunk a year into it and got very little value from it. I genuinely don't mind if games don't come out day one but a lot of the games I was hoping were on the service are over a year old now...kind of ridiculous IMO that they charge such a high price and don't even add them after that long of a time. Oh well, it's a sunk cost at this point so there's nothing I can do about it LOL.

I agree that the download speed is "fine", just not anywhere near as fast as PC or Xbox for whatever reason. I did have it plugged directly into my fiber 1gig connection too. Completely not a big deal, especially since all the games I'll be playing are finally downloaded now, but I've always been confused on why it's noticeably slower...maybe I just have bad luck or something haha.

I found the setting, thank you Sir! :)

Oh my goodness, I totally understand as I'm also a husband and a father to a toddler (2 years old) and a baby (1 year old). Despite that, I'm finding myself with a lot more free time as I switched jobs from a soul-sucking Public Accounting job to a really great 40hr a week corporate job so have time to finally play more.

Yeah, there were a few on the service that I was able to play so it wasn't a complete waste of money thankfully!

Yes it is possible those sites weren't clear on it being demos and not the games, there is a good library of titles on the upper tiers of PS+ (not worth for me since I've bought most of those games and second hand you can have them for a decent price) still of course when talking about 1st party offering there is no doubt GP have much more than PS+

Regarding the download I can't really compare since I don't have the others, I can say it is much faster than PS4 and even big games are installed in less than 1h in Brazil, but it is possible that it is much worse than Series (although I saw someone claiming in Twitter that his Series is very slow to download compared to PS5 but I seriously doubt it since both MP and download have been recognized as more stable/faster on Xbox than PS since 360 era).

PS5 slim looks nice and I agree the single player experiences are better than xbox that onely has halo as a main game series.

And the problem is that Halo haven't been able to keep the same level of reception as before.

It would be worth playing at least some of the games you mentioned on your PC since Spider-Man 1 and Miles Morales should be better there since the ports are high quality for those.

Make sure to play Astro's Playroom, legit one of my favorite experiences on the system