This is an opinion on the WiFi access points.

I took the unifi pill in 2018 on the advice of my devops coworkers that ubiquiti is set-and-forget. I also was sold on the unifi network controller I deployed and used until last month being easy to use and local only.

The single pane of glass to control and update the access points is nice. Wifi works OK. There are, however, several downsides:

• channel and power management are not automatic and tweaking WiFi settings with unifi is not intuitive.
• similar to your nas experience unifi advanced metrics are locked behind paying for other unifi equipment or an official controller.
• network appliance is built on mongodb and its performance is pretty abysmal (Up to 2.5GB memory to run it)
• the network appliance is now discontinued and self-hosting the network appliance can no longer happen software-only, you have to use their “server os”, which can’t be run in a container.

After the unifi Debian repo stopped updating properly, I decided to install openwrt on my APs.

Not only did it work well, but performance is now much better with openwrt.

I’m personally stepping away from brands that have their own ecosystems from now on, if I can help it. The enshitification is just too tempting for them, it seems, and it it’s always at our expense.