> if a bit on the expensive side.

chokes on coffee

From my old-man, everything-is-stupidly-expensive point of view, this is my scale:

cheap side | reasonable | expensive side | Deciso boxes

I'm not disagreeing but they are quite powerful and fanless, with generous networking ports and both RAM and SSD can be upgraded.

I haven't been able to find many other devices that tick so many boxes. These seem to exist on a class of their own.

Yep, and I can't disagree with that either, they know their niche (and know they're niche) and are catering to it.

Having said that, mikrotik hardware running OpenWRT feels like something that might scratch one of my itches.

	▲	cassianoleal a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah all fair. I actually got a Dec740 second-hand (I think it belonged to a small company that either folded or grew out of it) for a reasonable price, upped the SSD and the RAM, and now I'm building a router "platform" on top of Incus. The idea is to run OpenWRT passing through the ISP NIC and one (or both) of the SFP+ ones going to the switch, and also run other services in isolated containers. I'm even thinking about putting Home Assistant on a VM on it but I'm not sure yet what impact it will have on routing performance so that's on hold for now. It's so much more powerful than what I need for the router/firewall that it should be comfortable to run quite a few things on it, and I can start moving them off it to other devices if Internet speeds catch up to it in the future.