And I agree with them. If you use Pfsense, OPNSense or FreeNAS/TrueNAS, stay away from USB adapters and from realtek cards. They are all derivatives of FreeBSD operating system so they act similar.
OpenWrt is different from them because it's a Linux system (Like ChromeOS, Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, Fedora, OpenSUSE and others). Since Linux is much more popular than FreeBSD on PCs, laptops and embedded devices, the drivers for "non-server" hardware on Linux are usually much better.
Afaik the Realtek card driver for FreeBSD can crash randomly, drivers for some Realtek USB adapters don't exist at all, and the driver for ASIX USB-ethernet chipsets is subpar (cuts the bandwith down to 250Mbit last time I tried it, while on Linux it runs at nearly 1Gbit for days, as it should).
Well, I've received ER-X less than a month ago, but it's been pretty good. I've been replacing switches/outlets and switching off the main breaker panel every now and then, so it doesn't have a solid uptime, but it's been pretty reliable so far. Also, I've looked at the MT76xx issues @lukasz92 listed and looks like majority of them are for WiFi issues, hopefully I won't run into problems with the wired router.
I still have the same issues. If I use master, port isolation does not work. If I directly define interfaces with e.g. eth0.10, it works but then I test iperf, the direction from router to my client pc is max 10MBit/s. So everything is still the same. You have to revert the ip40xx edma changes.
Had to wait for a window to take down my X86 setup and replace with the EA6350 - results so far are good though! Easily handling 200/20 with cake and piece_of_cake and the WiFi seems about equal to the Unifi UAP-AC-Lite I have here. Looks like it's a good shot for the UK as I keep seeing people selling them for about £20-25 on eBay. I won't mark this as "solved" necessarily as some of the other options are also compelling.
EDIT - to clarify, I stuck with 19.07.3 and manually defined my VLANs by directly editing config files and all works well
EDIT 2 - Ah, 2.4Ghz drops off a cliff once you get too far away (2-3Mbps download and upload in a location that easily gets 30-40Mbps from the Unifi AP). There is some info about CT firmware in this thread:
Just need to clarify where exactly to get "pwr.bin" then I'll try it to see if it solves it. Not a biggie for me as I can use it without WiFi (I have the Unifi AP anyway) but obviously a deal breaker if attempting to use it as a combined router and AP...
Well, after replacing the firmware blob (the other thread is now updated, thanks @eginnc!) I got an improvement in 2.4Ghz performance, but it's still not as good as the UniFi AP (in the same spot, the EA6350v3 with replaced blob still only gets about 4Mbps up and down and the UniFi AP gets about 15Mbps). 5Ghz is pretty much the same for both of them.
But overall, an EA6350v3 second hand for about £20-25 seems to be a no brainer, especially as a wired-only device since it can happily shape my 200/20 connection.
I'm going to leave this thread unsolved in case anyone wants to add any devices to those mentioned above (but thanks to everyone who chipped in with suggestions - this thread is a a handy resource now).