It's 'easier' and 'more convenient' to run without Tor, however it is best to do so especially if you are hosting from home.
Not necessarily. As I have said previously, if you want to accept incoming connections, then port forward is inevitable if you don't use Tor, which isn't always trivial to do from my experience.
What's wrong with VPN + Tor combination?
There are two scenarios. You either route everything from Tor, and send the final message to the VPN, or you use your VPN as first-end proxy, and send the message to Tor afterwards. In the former scenario, your VPN knows the final message, and can de-anonymize you to some extent, and in the latter, everything you're supposed to hide from your Internet provider is firstly sent to your VPN provider. So in both cases, you have less anonymity than just using Tor.