What hardware do you recommend?

Tbh I just picked something that was in their list of supported hardware that also operated with the Wifi bands I needed and had a good amount of Flash and RAM. Try to take the time to research what wifi drivers suck, such as Broadcomm. Mine is a Qualcomm, I got the Linksys MX5300 Velop Mesh, and now that I got my 3 wifi VLANs set it seems pretty nice. Haven’t gotten to use it much though so we’ll see, but I’m excited.

I do recommend checking how many radios it has because I was maybe considering having my Smart TV on it’s own VLAN but I don’t have enough radios for that. Maybe I’ll put it on the IoT VLAN.

Are there any that are smart enough for a SMB setting where the APs all scan other networks and then talk to each other and set their own channels and power levels to optimize WiFi traffic with minimal channel or power overlap?

Sorry, I don’t know anything about this 😅 You’d have to research this.