I'm an avid user of Caddy but I think the more time it passes and the more opinionated it gets, the worse it becomes overall. I don't object to highly opinionated takes but when your biggest selling point is how neat the configuration is to write it becomes more of a pain when it just isn't anymore.

Two examples from my experience upgrading from Caddy 1 to Caddy 2:

Ex.1: Caddy 1 by default bound to an arbitrary port and served via HTTP, they now default to HTTPS, which doesn't work for me since I use traefik in front of it. Bypassing this means adding a ugly ":80" in front of every single vhost I have (which is 20+), before it was just about adding "ssl" if I wanted HTTPS.

Ex.2: The reverse proxy is now transparent by default, in Caddy 1 it wasn't and you just added a "transparent" flag if you wanted it, but now you can't opt out of it and you have to manually specify every header in the config.

I don't think my use-case is that unusual (file server behind edge router) and yet I feel like I have to work against Caddy every so many steps of the way, at one point I will have to ask myself how much more work would it take to just go back to nginx instead.

> when your biggest selling point is how neat the configuration is to write

To clarify, neat/easy configuration isn't our biggest selling point in v2. Flexible configuration is (one of them, anyway). Marketing an advanced web server as "easy" was a mistake in hindsight, so we don't do that anymore.

As for your use case, understandably it's slightly more tedious to do what you're trying to do. However, in our experience in helping hundreds of users in the forums and from what we see in issues, transparent proxy was the more common use case by far, and disabling that is usually as simple as setting the Host header to the address of the upstream. And we feel that enabling HTTPS universally is easier to understand than only enabling HTTPS for some hosts, and we made sure it's easy to disable when necessary.

(Most people just use Caddy, rather than proxying to it from other servers like Traefik, since Caddy can fit those use cases as well, especially with this plugin: https://github.com/lucaslorentz/caddy-docker-proxy)