FlexHD

This makes sense. Do the modeling. The AP placement really needs to factor in your home shape. I have a 3,700 sq ft three level wood frame home. Back in 2020 I installed two nanoHD APs on the ceiling to the top floor (about 12’ from each end of the house) and they did a pretty nice job of covering the main areas on both floors below. I added a couple of FlexHDs on the lowest level to boost signal in some odd corners down there. 6GHz won’t cover as well as 5GHz and certainly not as well as 2.4hz, so more APs would likely be needed to have good 6GHz coverage. For outside, you will want an AP located outside of your aluminum siding, of course. The outdoor APs are pretty nice. I installed a U7 outdoor at a vacation house and it really lit up the yard nicely. Just know that you will only cover one side with a single AP due to your siding being aluminum.

It's really not a lot worse that something like Asus, who has a decently robust interface (lots of consumer stuff hides everything behind "simplicity"). The payoff is reliability and a long service life (my oldest UniFi AP is 7 years old, still supported, and still working great.)

Just so you know, mesh doesn't bring roaming to wifi - any APs set up with the same authetication configuration (SSID, passphrase, security method) will allow wifi clients to roam amongst them as needed. Mesh uses what setups like Ubiquiti UniFi and commercial networking hardware use to allow *faster* roaming. UniFi would be my recommendation. It doesn't matter what your brother in law thinks.

UniFi - reliability, self-hosted, no cloud, no subscriptions etc.

UniFi has all the blocking and other features that you'd want. I have not tried it but it now also has ad blocking. At this point, I would never change. It's easy to maintain and upgrade etc. If something does fail, it's pretty simple to replace the component and keep moving. It's got a lot of enterprise type features that I like.

In consumer world - Asus and TP-Link are the better choices. Eero is great hardware has a subscription model for some needed (IMO) features. I would avoid Netgear, D-Link and Linksys - they are not what they once were and have subscription models, sometimes poor support, and varying reliability and quality. You could also consider gl.Inet Flint devices if you're looking for an all-in-one router, they have gained a very good reputation. I agree that a better choice than any of the above would be Ubiquiti UniFi and TP-Link Omada is also decent - it's different than the consumer gear. Reliability is one of the major points of these prosumer setups. I've been running UniFi for 7 years, it's great.

I’ve used Unifi APs for years with my Firewalla. Another option you might want to investigate is the Firewalla AP7.

Have you looked into Unifi? It’s not the cheapest and gets hate from the open source crowd because, well, it isn’t open source. It works really well though and they have a huge ecosystem to build out your network.

I disagree, I have 2 Unifi APs, both are connected to the same PoE switch (hence the same network), but one of them says it is connecting to the other because there appears to be a problem with the ethernet cable, it only gets the power over the ethernet cable but data is flowing through the other AP, then, this is effectively a mesh network. I need to change that ethernet run, but if the AP is working I don't really have to do it right now.

UniFi has a great designer tool that will help you figure coverage with the different devices.

If that’s the case get a ubiquiti Unifi system. Gateway plus access points. Best performance per dollar with a wired backhaul

UniFi is the most solid networking platform.