Its not that bad if you go with mikrotik, but their configuration isn’t for everyone as its a long way from say Asus in terms of simplicity.

Their budget 8x10gb is about £220, pretty reasonable for a fully managed switch. Sure its not going to let you max out all 8 ports at the same time with multiple vlans even with the hardware offload, but whose expecting that from a budget switch?

I am never really going to benefit from it fully, not least in the short to medium term. What I will get is the fun from upgrading.