> I just tell it what countries (or states / regions) to download, and it downloads them.
This is exactly how Organic Maps works. You don't _have_ to zoom in on every region you plan on visiting to download it, you can just go into the menu and select a whole country or parts of it.
Which is one in a series they did after some employees of a data broker or digital ad company (if I recall correctly) leaked a dataset to the New York Times because they actually were concerned about this kind of dataset existing.
Sounds very familiar. I switched to Foxy Droid, an alternative F-Droid client, years ago partly because its search functionality is miles ahead of the official F-Droid app. The popular and newer Droid-ify and Neo Store are forks of it I think, so should offer the same improvements.
Top results for 'ssh' in Foxy Droid: ConnectBot (SSH client), SshDaemon (ssh server), RSSAid (RSSHub... nothing to do with SSH), Easy SSHFS (Sshfs with ssh client), Trigger (open doors via SSH), FiSSH (SSH authentication via fingerprint), TeamBot (SSH client), SimpleSSHD (SSH server), etc.
Those results do look spot on. But I just installed Neo Store inspired by comments here, and it shows none of the apps I currently have installed through F-Droid..
You make it sound harder than it is. Most (if not all) ROMs offer the boot image as a separate dowload, often referred to as the "recovery"; LineageOS is one of them. You only need to patch and flash it once, after that you can just open Magisk after the OTA update has been installed but before rebooting, and choose the "after OTA update" install option.
Indeed, and I was talking about the boot image, but some still refer to it as the recovery, i.e. LineageOS. I see LOS have changed their download pages now and correctly call the boot image boot.img instead, that's good. So anyway, just download the boot image alongside the ROM instead of extracting it, and rerun Magisk install before rebooting after an OTA, and it's all very doable. Not as easy as before, but not too hard either.
LineageOS seems to make a name change just now with the boot and recovery thing. For reference, https://topjohnwu.github.io/Magisk/install.html is what I reference. The file you get instructed to path is the boot.img. Note how "you have to do something after every ROM upgrade" does not get mentioned - so it is a little bit better than I thought if Magisk has an action in the app that can be run before the reboot, but that's still way too brittle to be useable.
(I vouched for your comment, it was hidden, that's normal for new accounts.)
This is exactly how Organic Maps works. You don't _have_ to zoom in on every region you plan on visiting to download it, you can just go into the menu and select a whole country or parts of it.