Have you looked into HAProxy? Health checks, SSL termination and a reasonable configuration DSL: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduc...
* They were not purposely holding back features so they can be pay-walled
* Re-compiling were not necessary to add functionality
* More cohesive modification ecosystem
I know I said "reverse proxy" which HAProxy is cleary the more superior, but I didn't mean to limit my statement to reverse proxies. nginx does have a lot of other functionality people rely on..