Interesting, I don't really have downtime with my OpenWRT setup. Probably because I don't really touch the setup once it's there, other than occasionally doing the firmware updates.

Honestly, you got me on this one. I probably break my OpenWRT setup every three months or so on average.

I recently decided to stop running anything too fancy on it and keep the router itself simple: just secure, robust networking. All the tinkering has moved to chained network VMs in QubesOS instead.

It was definitely nice having different LAN ports behave differently, multiple VPNs, policy-based routing, filtering, monitoring, and all that. But yeah, every extra thing I add is another chance to break the whole network.

All that said, I could never imagine going back from OpenWRT. The answer to basically any networking idea is always “yes.” There are pretty much no limits. I especially like that it doesn’t try to hide networking terminology or abstract everything away. You really get to understand what you’re actually doing and can choose the exact configuration you need, down to the smallest detail. Everything is exposed.

For what it's worth there are now mini PCs on AliExpress with SFP+ ports. I have one running OpenWrt along with some inexpensive SFP+ modules that's been working great. Although with my setup, I opted to have an external wifi AP connected to it instead of relying on an internal wifi card.