Meshtastic UI is pretty far along that path right now. You can purchase a device for like $50ish that gives you a few miles of reach in the right conditions and has a decent UI built in (on the latest rev). If you want to run firmware on chips and use UI from your phone over Bluetooth you can run on like $12ish per endpoint.
It doesn't result in a high speed local network I could use for transferring files or hosting a LAN party though, right?
With the new mesh over UDP features in the beta, you can set up a long range directional WiFi mesh, and only use LoRa for the last hop.
LoRa itself is sub-mbps though.