It replaced an enterprise-grade Mikrotik router, which while no doubt being more performant (it has hardware offload for routing/firewall), was a pain to configure and certain scenarios are almost impossible to implement (WAN failover where one of the WAN interfaces is a PPPoE link) on it where as in OpenWrt they work out of the box.
The lack of hardware offloading for firewall/routing doesn't seem to be an issue in practice for gigabit links.