Nobody is advocating replacing cheap NAT home routers with unprotected routers. They're all advocating replacing cheap NAT home routers with cheap stateful fir

Nobody is advocating replacing cheap NAT home routers with unprotected routers. They're all advocating replacing cheap NAT home routers with cheap stateful firewall home routers. What the GP is trying to tell you is that you're conflating sateful filtering with NAT. If you rip the address translation part out of a NAT implementation, you get a stateful firewall. You're probably better off with a purpose-designed stateful firewall, but ripping the NAT out of NAT works and is an obvious reduction in complexity. Insisting that you lose packet filtering if you get rid of NAT is a straw man argument. Nobody is arguing for that. They just want to remove the address mangling portion of the cheap router while keeping the packet filtering.