Understood but he made a custom firmware so I thought no harm in giving it a try. Especially if it'll give a performance boost. 
Yeah, I tried the bin file. Not sure why it didn't work. I did a reset and then tried your image. 
Hi mate I have figgered what's going on. I feel rite dumb! lol The build you are running from 18.06.2 is ar71xx and the build I made is ath79. Sorry for having you confused. 
You can force the flash to switch from ar71xx to ath79. After that you would have to stay on ath79 builds. The 19.xx release of OpenWrt will moov the c7 to ath79 anyway. You can read more about it here:
https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/targets/ath79
Sorry again for over looking this. You can force the flash to switch back to if you dont like the build.
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@imthenachoman -- so you know what "ar71xx" and "ath79" are
Many of those that build their own firmware have moved from the ar71xx code (older-style Linux kernel configuration, "mach") to the ath79 code (newer-style Linux kernel configuration, "DTS") that has been in the development branch (master / "snapshots") a while ago. There isn't anything really "better" about ath79 for most end users, but for developers it is where future releases will be moving. There also isn't anything scary for me about ath79; all of my ar71xx devices are running ath79 here, and have been for probably a year now.
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@tapper Not an issue at all. I appreciate all the time and energy you're putting into this. I will spend some time this weekend figuring out how to force the flash. Thanks!
@jeff Thank you sir! That is a very helpful explanation.
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Is there any benefit to having a build without the router stuff? Its not like it should perform any different to the main build with that stuff turned off as WiFi is typically bridged to LAN anyway so not impacted by the firewall or NAT at all.
I've always disabled DHCP on the LAN and called it a day.
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