It is interesting to do a search of HN for past references to "Ubiquiti". Whenever the topic of routers came up, many comments followed that recommended them above any alternatives. Commenters seemed proud to tell the world they were using Ubiquiti, as if the "HN concensus" for home routers was to choose Ubiquiti.

It seemed to me Ubiquiti would never allow customers the option to install their own OS (e.g., BSD) or boot from external media containing a non-Ubiquiti OS, without sacrificing the benefits of hardware specs that were likely deciding factors in selecting the Ubiquiti hardware above existing alternatives. The intent was clearly to have Ubiquiti retain control over the hardware after purchase. The customer effectively remained tied to Ubiquiti forever, so if the company started serving ads, using AWS unnecessarily, etc., there's no way to opt out. Customer is compelled to accept all updates.

Specs are important, but maybe not as important as control.

Reliance on third parties necessarily increases potential risk. Unnecessary use of third parties is, IMO, poor decision-making. This is of course rampant in "tech" and, IMO, marks a triumph of the salesforce for those third parties over common sense, possibly assisted by network effects. Further, I dislike products where there is a heavy focus on opaque "updates". Again, many customers have been trained to believe that not updating is always the wrong decision. (Meanwhile they have no idea what is in each update.)

As stated in one of the blog post comments:

"It is even worse: Ubiquiti forced all users to use cloud-based authentification even for accessing your controller software on a local network with a local client. This was not even properly communicated but deployed by one of the regular maintenance updates."