Months later, my OpenWRT journey is basically: 30-60 hours of learning and setup, and then basically stable since then (especially since moving to r7800 off my super underpowered device). So some of this stuff will look like nitpicks, and it does come from a place of love that my OWRT is now more of an appliance than a test bench.
My big time sinks were:
- webUI
- tweaking SQM and finding on two separate devices that they were too slow for CAKE at 250Mbps (apparently in 19.x the r7800 was fast enough for this, and so I was lead astray by forum posts)
- guest network isolation
- attempted firewall of my work PC from my home network
- moving up from 2/5 star skill in Linux administration to 3/5 star (htop, ssh, nano, winSCP to load files on a remote machine but edit in my favorite windows text editor)
- the complex matrix between CAKE, codel, their different configs (simple, simplest...), flow offloading, and various observed max speeds based on inputted speed limits
- switching from official to forked builds and back
- hard to diagnose wifi issues (I think I ended up just wiring everything rather than figure out why it was a problem; besides, could I really fix it?)
Some other stuff that comes to mind:
What is a radio, the relationship between LAN, VLAN, WAN, your wifi SSID. The way guest networks are shown in the UI. I've found my way around every consumer router webUI from 2003-2015 and two other community firmwares (DD-WRT, Tomato) and the way OpenWRT presents this stuff is not intuitive. Powerful but unintuitive.
Which interface I should put SQM on.
what LuCI is (unintuitive name, and it doesn't stick in the brain because of the ambiguous i vs. L; Luci would be more readable but obviously lose the presumed abbreviation)
what the name LuCI means (I still can't find it)
How to follow -only- stable OpenWRT security releases/updates. Non enthusiasts have no reason to care about pre-release updates, or really anything but security updates. I've settled on this: https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/releases.atom
Which devices are most popular for OpenWRT. For enthusiasts it seems like the answer is WRT3200ACM, r7800 and similar CPUs, Raspberry Pi 4. Back in the day it was always fun to bring your own device to custom firmware, but these days my time is worth enough to buy a good $100-$500 device if it saves 20 hours of headache. Not only that, the gap between the worst and best consumer OWRT device has grown a lot since DD-WRT in 2005.
I tried and failed to isolate a physical ethernet port from my main network. I don't think this is such an unreasonable task.
A lot of this stuff is stuff you wouldn't encounter on a $150+ consumer router. These routers don't have the features OWRT does, but they are easier to understand for a novice. OpenWRT is incredible for free, open software, but it does have room to be more intuitive without sacrificing power.