Ah, I see. Well, that does make more sense now. I guess just have a surplus of mini PCs so for me it makes more sense to run one routing box and one server box, but I know how much use cases vary.

I agree about Intel vs Realtek to some extent. My Lenovo M73 OPNsense actually has a 2.5G Realtek mPCIe NIC on the LAN side and it has actually been pretty great and reliable so far! Transmit maxes out early at 2.28Gbps-ish but receive is 2.47Gbps (Jumbo). However, the other week it glitched out and reported UP but was actually unresponsive. I'm still looking for an mPCI Intel i226-V version of the same thing...

The only downside to your solution is that most people (me included) would rather have auto generated configs so that you don't accidentally expose everything to Internet or break everything with an iptables rule, but that's down to experience I'm sure.