The particle nature of dark matter is currently one of the biggest open questions of particle physics. Potential non-minimal dynamics governing the dark matter interactions can have drastic implications for their phenomenology and can inform our search strategies. In this talk I advocate for meticulous studies of a broad class of next-to-minimal models, namely Confining Dark Sectors. I will argue that such dark sectors establish a general framework that encompasses many simplified models of particle dark matter and serve as the natural target for many on-going and future searches. To illustrate the delicate (yet critical) effect of confinement in the dark sector, I will carefully examine the direct detection signal of the most minimal confining dark sector. In particular, I will show that the nuanced dynamics in such models opens up large swaths of the parameter space that was presumed to be ruled out prior to our work. I will then outline a vast research program motivated by such models, spanning various astrophysical and collider searches.