To be fair, then your bandwidth penalty just comes from something else.

(I run a large number of ERs, mostly because you can easily run so much other software on the hardware -- but they're not great devices if you need performance or reliability. "You get what you pay for" absolutely applies.)

And if you're feeling like a fun weekend hacking project it's also available on OpenBSD which runs on the EdgeRouter including support for the onboard packet accelerator.

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=152712417729497&w=2

Nothing against vyatta/edgeos but since getting into edge cases requires command line anyway, you can just start there without too much trouble.