Honestly I'm with packs on this one.
Panels offer auto-restarting on the server as well as a less-janky way of starting/stopping the server. I appreciate the effort that has gone into getting the discord bot to start / stop but it's non-reliable and it's pretty evident that the server's uptime has gone down the shitter even recently without a panel...
This consistent downtime has honestly evidently resulted in a declining playerbase and I think that a panel would mitigate this issue, at this point whether it be pterodactyl or amp
I think running it straight with a java instance was fine temporarily but now that we're in for it long-term I think it would far better suit the server if a panel was set up