Jessie Frazelle is not somebody just getting started, I am all but certain that she knows about pfsense and chose to not use it. There are a lot of reasons to

Jessie Frazelle is not somebody just getting started, I am all but certain that she knows about pfsense and chose to not use it. There are a lot of reasons to not use pfsense. Basically no SQM (eg: fq_codel), everything is a giant php script running as root, tons of simple features (eg: backup) have to be implemented as plugins unless you pay for the commercial support, and the most important of all: because it's not a normal freebsd system, you don't know exactly where to look when something breaks; you don't just have to find the broken config file, you have to find the script responsible for generating that broken config file. I am not a fan of pfsense. It's more likely that she'd go with a simple linux system considering the projects she's worked on, but I think it's cool that she didn't do that, either. There's something to be said for not having a bunch of different systems to maintain. Ubiquiti equipment is a bargain. You pay a one-time fee for equipment that is probably twice marked up from what it costs to make, and in result you get immediate patching of things like that recent WPA2 bug, great throughput via hardware acceleration, advanced features, etc., for a very long time. Set it and forget it.