zfnWhile the whole machine learning thing sounds pretty cool, I think it's clear from the survey that the majority of players aren't interested in paying for a config.
All I want in a config is to remove as much visual clutter as possible, and a nice performance boost, which I can already do thanks to the efforts yourself and others before you have put in. Paying a monthly fee just to "fine-tune specific values" just seems a little unnecessary and over the top in my opinion.
Yeah that's why I had the survey. But keep in mind that it's not just fine tuning values for your specific system configuration but also giving you recommendations on what quality levels to choose based on your specified quality/performance preference and it gives you estimates for the performance impact of different quality levels.
Also, the only thing you subscribe to is the service, not the values you obtain from it. So you could totally subscribe for just a month to get the optimal values and adjust quality levels with the recommendation engine, but you wouldn't get future updates to those recommendations as the service learns more.
However, this is primarily just supposed to be a donation (which a lot of people expressed wanting to do), so I think it's good to consider that instead of just the raw benefit.