The downside of tc is that it is kinda weird and tricky to get it to operate on incoming packets.

I had to write my own emulator once to simulate a specific commercial satellite terminal. The terminal had the behavior of queuing up packets until they hit a certain threshold or exceeded a time limit and then bursting them out in a big blob. It also "helpfully" reordered small packets to the front of the queue for better latency, which made TCP stacks very cross.