I want to thank the OG poster and the replies for sharing in this thread, it was really informational for me. I feel I have gone down the rabbit hole a bit and I have few things I want to ask here before opening a separate thread.
I read Creating driver-level VLANs in the docs, would it still work with DSA? I tried it out by creating a VLAN br-lan.6 on my netgear wac104 dumb AP, and br-lan has all the LAN ports. The problem is that I would able to ping from the dumb AP through the VLAN to the gateway (x86_64 openwrt) and it would work, but when I try to ping the dumb AP from the gateway it doesn't work and suddenly it triggers something on the dumb AP and that also makes pinging from the dumb AP to gateway not to work anymore.
Also, I had a recent encounter with a problem and I'm wondering if DSA is related (hence the rabbit hole). I honestly don't know how to explain this, but all of my problems seem to be pointing to DSA or the switch in general for some reason and I'm trying to figure it out (generally speaking, something is causing for packets to get lost when certain events happen, like in my linked thread or above with the driver level VLAN).
One thing that I couldn't find easily is how to "look into" what's going on at the DSA level or the (AFAIK) switch fabric. For example, it took me a while to figure out that tcpdump can't capture certain packets which are switched on the same br-lan interface across different ports. Or another example is that there is bridge command (found in package ip-bridge) and it has bridge monitor which I couldn't understand a thing from but it seems to tell what's going on in the DSA drivers/ports.
Appreciate your replies and thanks!