I still don’t know any good reasonably priced routers which supports Openwrt.
And sub-$20 routers have been well supported for years (e.g. TP-Link TL-WR841)
Based on that the original statement "I still don’t know any good reasonably priced routers which supports Openwrt." is very understandable. A lot of rows != an easy list of good routers.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Xiaomi-WIFI-Router-3-ROM-128...
Well I use it with OpenWRT and it's perfect, no regrets especially for that price
> I tried using both open (no auth) and WPA/WPA2
meaning even without encryption, the TCP performance with OpenWRT was worse than the original firmware.
* lack of hardware encryption support
* poor network performance (about 50% slower than with original firmware) - the issue I linked to
I don't think that the Archer C7 hardware (or most consumer router hardware) supports any kind of encryption acceleration aside from what's built in to the WiFi radios. If you want a hardware accelerated VPN, you need to either get one of the Cavium-based Ubiquiti routers or something with a relatively high-end processor implementing AES instructions.
The lower routing performance has largely been solved in 18.06 with software flow offloading.
If you also need an access point, the cost does start to increase a little, but it still isn't bad at all, IMO.
I've converted some devices in the past, the latest one being a small TL-MR3020 box which now connects my Ethernet printer to my home AP.
Though I like openwrt, the web interface could be improved (meaning: making it more clear and simpler) because the above task, although trivial, required a lot more time than it should have.
Openwrt also doesn't forgive errors: on another little router I mistakenly deleted or disabled the wrong interface, and now that box is unreachable from anywhere until I'll take the time to open it and connect a serial port to reconfigure it from a terminal. But that's more of a feature :)
i've used this project to put new life into a Buffalo router that's probably 10 years old and runs way cooler and more performant than the original firmware. same with an ASUS router that's probably 6 or 7 years old.
My grandmother has a SiteCom WLR-4000 (aka SiteCom WL-351, aka EnGenius ESR9850) and that has a 4MiB flash chip; building OpenWRT for it is a pain, but I can still get a flashable image that does everything I need it to do, including the stock web interface (LuCI), with 100k left for persistent configuration data.
It even has WireGuard (kmod-wireguard, luci-app-wireguard, luci-proto-wireguard) on it for a bridge to my router at my home.
When it breaks, or if I ever upgrade my WNDR3800, I'll give that to her. But for the time being it's still perfectly serviceable.