And at that point why not OPNSense? OpenWRT for me is what I would run on crappy BestBuy routers that can’t run a proper router OS. OPNSense is 100% amazing.

I don't know about that... I ended up getting a banana pi r3 (great discounts because they were pushing the r4)

I had to make a couple of tweaks for the fan controls (experimenting, i don't even remember if i wrote everything) and now i have a beast of a router with 8 cores, a 1TB NVME, 8GB RAM, and besides routing it hosts a media server and a bunch of containers. (gitea, home assistant, immick, ...)

If only it had a couple more USB-A ports..

You’re not running a BSD on an embedded device with full driver support any time soon. Linux won this space.