You’re interested in advanced home networking, a dual nic nuc running pfsense is going to give you a ton more options while at the same time teaching you real networking.
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.
http://www.virten.net/2016/06/additional-usb-nic-for-intel-n...
You can also use one NIC and VLANs.
The only NUCs that are worth it are the i5/i7s but they are rather warm and need a fan. (I have a first gen i5, its fucking awesome though.)