Hi leighton30,
Sebastian here, I hope you are doing well.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to leave a review, and for sticking with Jetpack. It really means a lot to read that the stats and security tools are pulling their weight for you.
I hear you on the WordPress.com account setup step; it is fair feedback. The reason it is part of the flow is that the connection lets your site talk to our cloud, where the heavy lifting happens (real-time stats processing, off-site backups, Akismet spam filtering, downtime monitoring, and so on). Keeping that work off your own server makes the features feel snappy, but I understand that the extra step at the start isn’t the friendliest first impression.
If you ever want to poke at the parts you have not explored, here is a full list of what comes with the free plugin: https://jetpack.com/features/
Thanks again for the kind words, really appreciated.
Warm regards,