since forever i've had the stupid stock ISP router by cox, the "paroramic wifi" (whatever that means) one. it worked fine enough to where i didn't bother to replace it for a while, until they started blocking features from the admin panel (port forwarding, dns, even changing the password!) in favor of the "Cox Paroramic Wifi" mobile app.
The mobile app is obviously just a proprietary afterthought that's extremely unpolished. It actually ended up wiping all my settings (dns, portforwarding) and the app broke entirely for 24 hours and brought down my image host, media server and personal website. That was the final nail in the coffin, and the same day I bought a new router.
My new router is the GL.inet Flint 2 that i bought off scamazon. it was highly recommended in the OpenWRT scene, and i gotta agree it's pretty awesome. Wifi 6, 5 LAN ports, fast speeds, guest networks, built in adguard, lots of bells and whistles. It has really good specs too, 4 cores @2ghz, 8gb storage, 1gb ram, even beats some laptops I have, you're even encouraged to run docker on it because of the excessive specs.
might just keep the stock admin panel instead of flashing openwrt onto it, it's pretty damn good for a stock panel and i'm pretty sure it's built on top of OpenWRT.
really happy to finally have a real router i can fuck with. more on what i do with it later :) also, first post