Had a similarly convoluted network for some years... over time you realize it's just pointless to waste time maintaining and troubleshooting said setup.
Today it's ISP router + separate AP (better coverage). Chinese hackers aren't attacking my network, and if they did, cool, have at it. Basic firewall + NAT + AV covers 99% of use cases, even in a business, with the right configuration. Turns out I don't miss pfSense either.
Makes sense for keeping skills up to date, though, and as a hobby, I can see how one can get into it. Reddit's r/homelab has some crazy builds to check out.
I essentially have a foot in both camps... I like having the control and autonomy of open-source networking hardware but I don't have enough spare time to make it a full-on hobby. Right now my "happy spot" is:
1. An OPNSense firewall between my cable modem and the rest of the network running on a low-power PC Engines APU2. The web-based UI is funky but workable, full SSH access to the box for digging into the internals when needed, online upgrades are a cinch.
2. An 8-port gigabit unmanaged switch that everything hangs off of.
3. A Netgear WAX218 business-grade access point for wifi, running the stock firmware. Web UI is decent and doesn't require any cloud-based management bullshit. For around $100, it works much better than it has any right to, given the prices of mid-range APs and wifi routers these days.
4. A small fleet of Raspberry Pis for miscellaneous tasks.
If I get more into IoT, it shouldn't be much of a hassle to add VLANs and maybe another switch.
That sounds like a good "happy spot" and doesn't veer in hobby territory IMO. More like an interest.
In retrospect, I lied a bit about not missing pfSense (or OPNSense in your case) because truthfully I miss the monitoring, packages, configuration and expandability options. At the same time, I also don't miss them, because 0 headaches and actually better latency is still a plus. Just need to login to that god awful ATT interface to open up a port, but these are 1st world problems... there's always VPNs and cloud VPS to fix that.
Unless you're really into managing a small fleet of devices for basic functionality I'd highly recommend replacing them with a single Intel NUC or similar. I did the same after one too many SD card failures and was very happy with the results - you get a significantly more powerful server for a power footprint about the same as all the horribly inefficient USB power adapters running a bunch of Pis.
I'd sub the ISP router for a £120 topton box with vyos on it, just because it can handle smart queues at line rate. It's really nice when you have exactly the same low ping and jitter regardless of other load on the network, with bandwidth splitting equally, and ISP routers just can't do that in my experience. It just works and requires zero fiddling.
TBH, haven't gone into anything deeper than a ping and jitter benchmarks, so not terribly in depth or long-term besides occasional tests out of curiosity.
ATT fiber 300 up/down provides 4 ms consistent ping to google's closest's datacenter, sometimes at 3 ms, which is of course nuts. Might as well be in my apartment block. Perfectly happy with provided unit, although it's an older one.
Tangential, but have used vyOS some years ago to create a makeshift 10G switch using commodity hardware and an old PC. Routed and switched amazingly fast - the demise was related to what I could guess were broadcast storms.
I'm with you in spirit however. Want and will probably need to switch back to a more customizable router.
I have something relatively similar, a bunch of old datacenter equipment (cheapest way to get 10+ GB!) and some mikrotik, and then I have hardcoded DHCP leases for my IoT shit, and extensive blocking at the firewall for those devices/MAC addresses.
Today it's ISP router + separate AP (better coverage). Chinese hackers aren't attacking my network, and if they did, cool, have at it. Basic firewall + NAT + AV covers 99% of use cases, even in a business, with the right configuration. Turns out I don't miss pfSense either.
Makes sense for keeping skills up to date, though, and as a hobby, I can see how one can get into it. Reddit's r/homelab has some crazy builds to check out.