which one is better, hardware price & performance wise, getting an IQrouter vs using a router to flash openwrt for mitigating bufferbloat, & which one uses better SQM algorithms,& also for wifi Airtime fairness & all that, also does openwrt support automatic bandwidth & SQM configuration like the IQrouter?
IQrouter is plug and play after having payed upfront for the benefit. Some of its technology is protected by patents (one of which I filed third party observations against). It is likely not very configurable. You have a small choice of hardware. It is backed by individuals who want to make money.
OpenWrt is free, highly configurable and you have a huge choice of hardware. It is not plug and play. It is backed by enthusiasts working on things in their spare time.
I am the maintainer of cake-autorate, which provides the adaptive bandwidth aspect of cake. No head-to-head comparison with IQrouter has been made so I can't accurately report on how the performance of the adaptive bandwidth aspect compares. My arrogant guess is that cake-autorate outperforms whatever has been implemented in IQrouter, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong because that would motivate further work on cake-autorate to beat IQrouter.
You can read through user reviews here:
https://www.amazon.com/IQrouter-Self-Optimizing-Router-Improved-Quality/product-reviews/B07Y8TQ5C6
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So my subjective opinion (compared to my objective opinion 
) is that I like evenroute and consider their products worth recommending for those that do not (yet, if ever) feel ready for diving into OpenWrt*. They were trailblazers in that they developed and marketed their adaptive rate seting approach quite early on. Given how the IT business works nowadays I can't even fault them for trying to patent their method (I am not a fan of the patent inflation we are seeing in many fields, but I understand the motivation especially of smaller players to participate in that game).
That said the iqrouter approach (as far as I understand) aims for adapting to slower but relatively consistent changes in achievable throughput only, it does so be repeatedly saturating the link to get a reliable current link capacity estimate. This is quite different from how cake-autorate operates with its monitoring of and reaction to constant delay measurements.
Cake-autorate is considerably more versatile (if you can handle fast rate changes, slow changes are a piece of cake) than the iqrouter approach, but that comes at a cost, it will by itself put more CPU load on the router.
*) Not primarily for their autorate appraoch, but because they offer (semi-)automatic updates, which I consider really important especially for casual router users. I rather would have my family use an iqrouter with automatic updates, than running an OpwnWrt version specifically tailored to their needs that will only ever see an update once I get around to it... (sidenote, none of my family uses either OpenWrt nor iqrouters as far as I can tell, but since nobody complained about internet/latency issues I will not volunteer even a recommendation, living 300-400 km away is simply sub optimal for doing hands on tech support.)
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Sounds quite interesting for some use cases. They are also selling refurbished ones for 59$ and offer a pro version for higher line speeds.
Some specs
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I see what you did there.
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I can say with confidence that all my interactions with evenroute have been quite professional, courteous and generally helpful (and I am not even one of their customers). It seems you had a far less amicable interaction with them, or how did you reach your, frankly, somewhat impolite assessment of their product and business acumen? And if you had no adverse interaction with them, why do you come to such harsh a judgement on them?
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I've installed several IQrouters for friends, but for most, all I did was observe them deploy it on their own and then help them with mesh AP setups that we connected to the IQrouter. The setup is super-simple, anyone can do that, so if this is for someone who is not super-technical, it's what I recommend to folks. But even some of my tech peeers own one, as it's easy to manage.
As moeller0 points out, a major benefit is that they provide regular firmware updates installed OTA with one click.
After seeing it in action for others, I now run an IQrouter Pro on my gigabit cable line, as the paltry 35Mbps up is bloated (and variable). Their dynamic adjustments work very well on my line.
Their build is from a master release of OpenWRT, so one can use the package system to install whatever extras one might want. I've installed a few, such as Netdata, and it's all fine.
The customer support is top-notch, not only for myself, but several friends mentioned that too, so one gets good value for the money.
So if the problem is a bufferbloated line, then the IQrouter is a good plug-and-play answer. But one caution, if the line speed is >200, get the Pro (which now handles up to 2.5Gbps), as the V3 seems to run out of CPU.
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Sounds quite interesting for some use cases. They are also selling refurbished ones for 59$ and offer a pro version for higher line speeds.
Some specs
Your link goes to the tech specs for the V3, and this is the link to the Pro version (which I have): https://evenroute.com/iqrouter-pro
Besides the way faster CPU, the Pro adds DNS over TLS (DoT) out of the box, so more insulated against snoopy ISPs. Not having to mess with stubby was a plus for me.
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