@Gingernut since you a few weeks ago, I finally moved my network over to the MT6000 and ran some tests. Using Samba 4.18.8 (latest available in OpenWrt) average of 3 tests each target read/write 5GB in files:
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WRT32X - Read: 102 MB/s, Load%: 95/18. Write: 106 MB/s, Load%: 92/21.
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GL-MT6000 - Read: 85 MB/s, Load%: 13/8/32/5. Write: 112 MB/s; Load%: 30/24/26/12.
Conclusions: using "Enable Extra Tuning" no difference was observed on either target so left it off. Interestingly the 85 MB/s read on MT6000 seems like a hard limit it sat there pegged on several tests. Maybe a tuning parameter somewhere can improve that. USB3 SSD was mounted with kmod-usb-storage-uas (uas drive seems to be required by this target).
So in general the 7 year old mvebu is actually a little faster, but leaves nothing in CPU0 for anything else which is not ideal. A surprise, but it's known to be a performant platform. Coincidentally WRT32X is more consistent with SQM results too which I might post about elsewhere.