> They hired the original author of pfsense to build them a firewall based on Debian from scratch when they realized vyatta wasn't going to meet their needs. The UDM kernel is very much not OpenWRT

You're (perhaps unintentionally) also spreading bad information here.

The original 'author' of pfSense was Scott Ullrich, not Chris Buechler. While they were partners in the project, Scott was technical, and Chris did a lot of work back then on documentation, by by his own admission back then, "I am not a developer", and this, even though he was CTO.

http://freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/interview_with_jeff...

Ubiquiti originally hired two of the devs out of Vyatta to maintain their fork of the Vyatta codebase. These two were known on the Ubiquiti forum as 'stig' and 'An Chen'. Both left in the first half of 2016, and then (and only then) did Ubiquiti hire Chris Buechler, in an attempt to maintain and extend the Ubiquiti firmware. Chris has since left Ubiquiti and is now at Alta Labs.