Optional packages, installable on-the-fly

Such as adblocking (pi-hole like experience without additional gear)

ssh access, printserver, dynamic DNS, VPNs, different routing protocols, vlan support, tunneling protocols, monitoring, home Automation, wireguard, wpa3, OWE (encrypted open wifi), lots of goodies known from other linux distros, etc

Here are some pointers on whats possible: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/start

Edit: added examples. And er, that stuff is ordinary for me :-)

You get frequent software updates with meaningful changelogs and detailed lists of bugs/vulnerabilities fixed.

Also, you can be quite sure that there are no software components active that serve the interestest of the device's manufacturer more than those of its owner and users.

I have two cheap WiFi Access Points. They worked fine when I got them. After a few weeks one of them stopped working and I had to restart it. A few days later the other one had the same problem. This repeated every few weeks. Once i got tired of restarting the APs every now and then, I looked into it and figured it was a memory leak in the firmware. Then I installed OpenWRT and I didn't touch the APs since. It just works. Pretty amazing if you ask me.

The UI isn't slow.

This is a serious pet peeve of mine with other routers. I don't need a heavy frontend just to configure my router, I want to open port forwarding quickly. Fading effects and fake loading swirls are utterly unnecessary. There's none of it in OpenWRT.

* Security updates for way longer than the vendor would provide them.

* Privacy (lots of stock firmwares phone home). With OpenWrt your hardware is _yours_.

* When you do have to interact with the router, you don't die from its terrible UI (in fact, OpenWrt has a great one).

Better security in general. The firmware on consumer-grade routers is an afterthought. They are routinely running 10-year-old versions of services which are sometimes exposed to the internet, and all insist on rolling their own shitty web UIs which often include command injection vulnerabilities.

Integrating wireguard routes into your local network and overriding DNS with trusted endpoints. These are common enough needs these days to be considered ordinary.

It doesn't report home

Default router firmware is often a security nightmare the vendor barely bothers to patch. OpenWrt firmware receives regular security updates. I'd rather my router not become a botnet participant.

Massively decreased chances of run-by attacks exploiting known vulnerabilities in mass produced mainstream routers. Having a "more exotic" setup already avoids a lot of (non-targeted) attack vectors.

It keeps configuration in files in a *nix-esque file system, which allows me to keep router config and changes in git.

OpenWRT lets you control and access the device you own

Thank you everyone who replied!

SQM for bufferbloat

Updates