Quick straw poll...

> Do you just accept and embrace OpenWRT? Or do you eschew specialized hardware&software and do everything by hand with generic Linux distros on generic Linux boxes? Or is it something else?

Option 2, but I kind of got pushed down that route.

My ISP-facing outer wall is a Netgear I found in the trash - worth what I paid for it, frankly - with every possible feature turned off and only functioning as a NAT gateway and modem. I used to have an even older one that I successfully installed OpenWRT on, but it wouldn't sync above 8Mbit. I've got a drawer full of various models (apparently other users of my ISP are dissatisfied with the junk they keep getting sold too) but none of them have useful OpenWRT support and I've bricked a few in trying.

My real router is a normal Linux box on my LAN with a messy hand-rolled nftables setup (tidying it up has become a Forever Project, it'd be much easier if I didn't have to fight nft's parser every step of the way) and everything is shunted through tc-cake, which works amazingly well despite the middlebox.