I've had a box of old wifi-routers for years that I'd been meaning to reverse engineer and write up blog posts on the vulnerabilities to educate people on just how poor quality the software is written for the things you buy in your local electronics store. Every 3-4 years I'd have to buy another because the manufacturer stopped providing updates, even when I was buying their higher-end stuff.
I myself moved on to an Ubiquiti Edge Router almost 10 years ago, but Ubiquiti didn't do a great job of that in the long term and they ditched the EdgeRouter/EdgeMAX line so I ended up (and I wasn't interested in Unifi line for my router/firewall) buying a Protectli box, flashed coreboot and used pfSense for a while before eventually moving to OPNSense.
I came to the conclusion over this time that any consumer network equipment is basically junk and if you care at all about security you shouldn't use it; sadly that's easier said than done for non-techy folks.
Many pieces of older/cheaper hardware can be flashed with OpenWRT and I'd recommend that as the cheapest option for anyone who cares just a little, and doesn't want to buy new hardware, and for everyone who really wants to make an effort should buy some hardware that can run a properly maintained router OS like pfSense or OPNSense, even an all-in-one wifi-router-switch if you don't want to build out an entire SMB network.
Yeah Ubiquiti used to be great before they went the other way. Now Mikrotik is the new hotness.
I've been looking at some of the Mikrotik releases; I'll almost certainly be going Mikrotik when I get around to upgrading my home network to 10Gb, I'm just looking out for new APs and will probably replace them all at once.
Current using Unifi AP-AC Pros and Unifi 6 Pro around the house, but I keep having to move them around because the (newer) U6 Pro has atrocious range on both 2.4GHz and 5GHz compared to the AP-AC-Pro and my wife is getting annoyed at the poor WiFi signal on the living room TV (constant buffering), so I put the AP-AC-Pro back and it's better for the TV but slower for everything else.
Not sure if there's a better Unifi AP I can get for this part of the house or if I need to switch everything out as don't want to mix AP manufacturers/management tools.
Give me ethernet or give me death. I have a couple MikroTik RBcAPGi-5acD2nD-US cAPs connected to a couple CRS312 10gb switches connected via a XS+DA0001 cable to my RB5009UG router, which is connected to a 2.5gb modem. I don't put a lot of stress on my wifi, since I don't think I've ever seen a WiFi network I'm truly happy with outside a Google office, but these have served me well enough. Mikrotik has a newer v6 ax AP and they're easy to deploy once you figure out how. That might help you, since the solution to your problem might simply be having more.
Best thing about Mikrotik though is they've got this incredible management program called WinBox64.exe which is a 2.2mb single-file dependency-free executable that needn't be installed. It's super lightweight. Like they coded it without any frameworks. It feels like being back in the circa 2000 golden age of Windows, and the GUI is so rich and powerful and dense that it makes your desktop look like a hacker movie to normies who happen to be looking over your shoulder.
> Give me ethernet or give me death
This is pretty much where I'm at. I went from having a fully wired home to moving into a larger, solid-brick home, since then, I've had to rely on adding APs to get coverage to certain critical points, because otherwise I need to do extensive work to run cables; there's nowhere to hide them in solid-wall houses other than to tear holes into the walls and bury them there; my wife won't settle for trunking all over the show.
I do need more APs, particularly in the upstairs, but the one that affects the TV shouldn't be a quantity issue; it resides on the ceiling, directly above the door to the living room, the TV is on the opposite side of the living room to the door, about 5 meters away. I suspect the couple of feet wide area of bricks about 8 inches thick is attenuating the signal from the U6 Pro enough to make it unusable for the TV, despite the wide open door frame directly below, while the AP-AC-Pro manages just fine. The reason I don't just add an AP _in_ the living room, is the same that I don't just run ethernet, which is that it's a challenge without doing lots of damage and thus remedial work to get the cables there.
I fully intend to run ethernet there, and everywhere else when I can, but we recently redecorated everywhere after we moved in, so my wife might just kill me if I do it now; and we're back to square one, death.
> Best thing about Mikrotik though is they've got this incredible management program...
That's amusing, hopefully I'll get to check it out if it can run under WINE, 2000 really was the golden age of Windows and I haven't run it since, every PC, laptop, server, etc in this house runs Linux or *BSD.