A couple followup points:
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Packet steering might make sense in one particular case - using only the onboard gigabit port and VLANning it into WAN and LAN. Having 5 transmit queues available to the Broadcom driver would likely make steering make sense there (but I have not tested such a configuration). Note to testers: You won't see any payoff with iperf. Queue hashing is done by IP/port modulo queue slot, so unless you have at least 5 separate network streams going, you won't see any potential benefit...this is a real-world test scenario, not lab-based.
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I genuinely believe the business of Realtek (RTL8152/UE300) vs. Asix (AX88179) is apocryphal with no real benefit of one over the other. I never did any heavy testing, but all of my early testing/dev work was on Asix (Amazon's variant, specifically), and I never noted any unusual performance characteristics or issues. My production setup is on UE300, but I may go back and run a week or two on Asix just to get a better real-world feel for this.
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I was stunned at how easily GPIO-throttled cooling works. See this post for details: