Can get from $20-$50, Mediatek chipset handles a lot in hardware. CPU doesn't break a sweat when this device NATs at a gigabit. MIPS 880mhz cpu is less beefy than ARM devices, but it handles data so well that basically all the CPU power is available for your tasks. This device sold me on Mediatek.
I have two Netgear 6700v2's running as dumb ap's on opposite ends of my home gigabit-wired at the center to my TP-Link Archer A7v5. Each cost ~$40usd all running Openwrt 21.02.1. For wifi-5ghz, I average ~600Mbp/s on the 6700v2 and ~300Mbp/s on the Archer A7v5.
I really dont want the A7v5 and and rather use one of the 6700v2's as my primary, but I cant configure VLANS (vlan filtering) without soft-bricking. Seems the MT6721 chipset on this router use DSA configuration and dont support the older style switch configurations. so its been a dead-end getting vlan tagging working with them. As dumb AP's, they work with multiple vlans, no problem, no config required.
A friend of mine got one, seems to run stable in general and range is certainly better.
I've ordered two myself to compare the Linksys MR8300 ones I have. I think they're mainly interesting because ARM64 is a much better platform (including crypto extensions), SoC development seems to be progressing more than IPQ4*** (which works nice although there are some issues with the ethernet related subsystem) and WAVE 2 11ac should be fine too. The DIR-860L isn't bad (MT7621) but its starting to show its age and interest is declining so I would expect more issues further down the road.
Gave it a spin today, the included PSU feels really cheap (fire hazard-ish level) so I replaced that another one but other than that it's seems to perform really well. Compared to Linksys MR8300 it seems to have much better performance. I have two connected via WDS between two floors and the Totolink performs about 3 times better than the MR8300 downstairs (~95mbit vs ~270mbit). Hardware crypto also seems to be working although I'm not sure if that also includes the official snapshot images (GCC documentation is a bit unclear about what it enables by default by setting -mcpu=cortex-a53) since I compiled my own image (OpenSSL with all optimization enabled, -O2 instead of -Os for global optimization and lastly enforcing hardware crypto extentions, -march=armv8-a+crc+simd+crypto -mcpu=cortex-a53+crypto vs -mcpu=cortex-a53). Seems to have a very good bang for the buck ratio! =)
Firmware/Image based on commit: https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/commit/dc2da6a23369c8da069321dcfd593a9cf8c993c6