I built this setup a little while back and am very happy with the results. It took only a few hours on a Saturday and most of it was playing with settings for fun.

Dang, I suspected it from the description of what you were doing because pfsense is so awesome for that kind of stuff.

Just thinking from the perspective of remote support, I can't really walk my folks through a pfsense setup over the phone if there is a hardware failure... :/

I love Merlin, too. The best deal for budget users is to get the AC1900 but as the T-Mobile version. It can be found for about $60 and and you'll need a few hours to flash the Merlin software over the TMobile firmware.

Best router I've ever had, and I run it with a PiHole on a Pi 3.