(should probably disclose that I am one of the devs that maintained the apu2 coreboot boot firmware)
My problem with APs running proprietary FW is that I don't trust them to be secure, even if the vendor does updates, you never know what they're doing in the background. E.g. some APs have a hidden secondary SSID for their proprietary mesh implementation. With OpenWRT I can set them up exactly the way I want to, using open standards (mesh, roaming) instead of vendor-specific crap.