Pine64 and other singleboards vs wifi routers what's the catch?

Another aspect of choosing an SBC is to extend the open source idea to the HW. Everything is documented, there are schematics, a community and you basically know what you are getting.

When I think of netgear for example, they only hid their backdoor better after they were exposed. Or having to open an account to be able to "use the full scope"...that already makes my toenails roll up.

Yes, you would mostly overcome that issue with OpenWrt, but I try to avoid these companies when I can. Unfortunately, there's not always a way around it.

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As a rule of thumb: at the same price, a SBC will have much better processor and RAM (dual or quad are only part of the equation, if you have 4 weak cores a dual core with stronger cores is still better), but very bad wifi/bluetooth, and no onboard managed switch.

The router has a weaker CPU/RAM but has good wifi and the managed switch.

So a SBC is better for a "firewall" work where you put it in a corner attached to ethernet cable and let it block ads, do port forwarding and share usb drives.

If you need wifi you must get a dedicated wifi access point or a wifi router, the wifi of most SBCs is weak and designed to be used as a client, so the SBC can connect over wifi, but it's not good for multiple devices or AP mode.

How painful is it to set this up for someone with limited OpenWRT / advanced networking experience? I'm predicting a NAT / subnet nightmare. I had a DSL box I wanted to use as a dumb modem but it kept wanting to assign IPs.

It's very easy to use a router as an AP. Just make sure it's connected to the router by one of its LAN switch ports and leave the WAN port empty. Set the LAN interface IP address to something other than default, but on the same subnet, e.g. 192.168.1.9, so it doesn't conflict with the router. Set the LAN interface's "DHCP" setting to "ignore this interface", and its firewall zone to "unspecified". In system/startup, stop and disable dnsmasq. Delete the firewall zones and any rules. You now have a dumb AP.

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Further reading: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/dumbap