[trogggy]

I tried running Kodi on one of my Zero Ws, it was... um... disappointing. I mean, it ran... but was laggy when not doing direct playback (I don't recall the performance of playback, I didn't run it for very long)
I'll give it a shot... it's not like it takes a long time to set them up  

I don't have a pi zero, but I do have a couple of Pi 1's, that are about equivalent - and they're very slow, as you say.  Playback is pretty good but the rest is light years away from a Pi3.