Ubiquity would have added another zero (at least) to the price here and bring cloud features I very determinedly did not want to have in the first place (check the original post at https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/09/14/1630).
This wasn't hours of tweaking. Well, over almost a year, maybe two hours, but no more than that.
Unifi doesn't have any cloud requirements that I know of. But yes they are more expensive than the hardware you've got, at $100 per AP.
For my needs unifi was worth it to not have to deal with OpenWRT again, or worse, stock firmware on consumer APs.