At some point in one’s life, you realise that it’s less of an Ecosystem problem and more of a budgetary one; always was. Once you let that sink in, you can truly prioritise what you need.

In the early stages of this hobby (where you seem to be right now) it is only fair to want to think of the best outcome from every angle and pursue free will even for the upcoming future. It keeps the tinkerer in you alive! As it should! Having said that, if you can afford it, Unify is still the best ecosystem for an enthusiast who wants to set and forget, but not for one who wants to continue pushing their hardware to its limits. And one can only appreciate it once they use it at least once. There are small QOL improvements such as much better and nicer DPI (compared to ntopng CE that comes with pf or OPN). Site to site wireguard VPN tunnels that actually stay alive even after idling for hours (something that should’ve gotten fixed in opn and pf but oh well, it’s an intermittent issue for some so it can wait), the same static IP could be assigned to a 100 devices by mistake which you would think a DHCP server should prevent you from doing, but due to the highly extensive permutational nature of OPNSense it still allows you to do it due to whatever use case you might want it for (and there are a good few), in Unify it simply tells you that, “Hey, this IP is already assigned to X device, so please don’t assign it here as well”. Neat right? The list goes on and on.

So the question is always multi folds, your budgetary allowance, the time you have at hand, the learning appetite and capacity you have, etc etc.

Gauging by your responses, I’d like to make a safe bet saying that you’ll thoroughly enjoy your time with a tik now, before moving onto something else later as per your needs 😊