I originally planned to go for an all in one, but then started finding cool stuff and it made sense to make it so I could swap out bits of the set-up without having to replace the whole thing.
OPNSense versus OpenWRT. I got lead astray! 😂 but seriously, everyone says that eventually everyone ends up running OPNSense anyway.
Regarding the Banana Pi, I was looking at them for ages and someone said to go for the NanoPi over it as the support on the software NanoPi is better.
Regarding the rest of you post, I'm still trying to digest it. Clicking links and reading stuff, but I wanted to thank you. Truly!