However, if things continue to get locked down, I will be going the micro-ATX or SBC (RPi) route and installing a custom firewall/router.
I smell the NSA and that damned Utah data center in the lock down. Will not go to anything unrootable. I paid for it. I own it.
Used to be a big DDWrt fan, but I have Cisco equipment in my home network, and using DDWrt on a retail router was the bottleneck in my network. Retail hardware isn’t designed to push higher bandwidth. It’s intended for your average Joe home user. I run TeamSpeak, Minecraft servers, web services, and VPN over my home networks, I need the pipes.