The thread is too deep to reply direct, but you appear to be more or less agreeing. There are low powered x86 systems at that price point. pfSense has offered

The thread is too deep to reply direct, but you appear to be more or less agreeing. There are low powered x86 systems at that price point. pfSense has offered a software upgrade path for over a decade, and takes security advisories seriously, so how many store bought routers can boast anything close to that? pfSense also scales up to 10gbit forwarding performance. I can't really comment on the cruft, AFAIK you don't need to run an IDS and that is all in packages.