Best Wifi router around $200 for LEDE

[muhaha]

R7800 ... can use only 19mb of 128Mb NAND, unless you compile yours own image, (extroot possible ofc)

Netgear R7800 exploration (IPQ8065, QCA9984)

By default, yes, only some 19 MB is available after flashing the router: to preserve the possibility to revert back into a fully functional Netgear OEM, the LEDE firmware is only stored to the 30 MB "ubi" partition and the 70 MB "Netgear" partition is left intact and marked read-only.. But you can compile an image that uses a larger portion of the flash: https://forum.openwrt.org/t/netgear-r7800-only-19mb-flash-available/1115/1

E8500 ... specially newer revisions can NOT be flashed with LEDE

What's your favorite enthusiast LEDE/OpenWrt device?

With the latest snapshot builds, yes - testing a EA8500 with this recent build now: LEDE Reboot SNAPSHOT r4589-cb2a391 / LuCI Master (git-17.194.28316-2224714) Just flashed this week (7/20), so only up for 2 days so far, no issues. Depending on the Board Rev., flashing without header pins for the Serial TTL -> USB cable is a bit challenging though. The 17.01.2 release build did not run well on this unit, it locked up. I would use the 4.9 current snapshot build: http://downloads.lede-proje…

ZyXEL NBG6817 has really really ugly case... Wife acceptance factor = -100
But it has 4Gb eMMC storage