With the depth of your experience, what's your prosumer recommendation? MikroTik?
1. I am familiar/setup to handle their quirks and had 99% of the setup already done.
2. I really wanted an AP with Dual 5Ghz AND dual 2.4 Ghz dedicated antennas for some very specific applications (multiple rtsp streams over wifi+client plex wifi streams+client traffic. With the first two largely being on 2.4Ghz.
3. I am lazy (lots of this, my wife is less tolerant of me re-designing the wheel and being locked into an upgrade for days)
4. The security stuff i had mostly addressed anyway.
If this were a greenfield purchase or I didn't really need/want dedicated radios.
Id go with a ruckus. the r700 unleashed and/or r500 unleashed can be found cheap and are chock full of features. and 2x2:2 is normally going to be perfectly fine in a home setting.
Going with ones that are "unleashed" mean that the controller runs on the AP's. not extra hardware needed.
For most home uses. wave1 is still more than enough and their Wave1 AP's can be had cheap. Hell you can probably even get one of the R710/R510's in a very good price range and be at wave2.
For switching...mikrotik is solid for cheap and works and stable. Even modems etc. For firewalls my preference is BSD, so something like opnsense...But mikrotik will probably do okay as well.
This is the problem with Ubiquiti, and maybe why they feel they can advertise in their UI and let their quality slip: a new r710 lists for $1295.
That's almost four times as much as a UAP-AC-HD. On sale for $810 it's still over twice as much. Some of the Ubiquiti WiFi 6 stuff can be had for $100-150.
Like, yeah, I'm sure Ruckus is way better, but I'd hope so for the price difference.
Regardless of list price. They can be had as cheap as ubiquiti and their software/firmware is not only better but doesn’t have all the telemetry crap built in.
I'm assuming you're talking of used hardware as this isn't the case, at least in the UK.
Ruckus refreshes their gear fairly frequently and the overstock can be had at a steep discount. Those not needing to do huge, high density deployments in things like auditoriums, stadiums, classrooms and the like but are just looking for something for their home can get a really solid piece of gear (imho better than ubnt) at a steep discount.
Its not really the same as even grey market Cisco stuff.
Like i said, i stuck with ubnt because of some specific things, including the fact that I could re-use mounting holes/measurements and could upgrade in an hour vs rebuilding entirely.
There is some hope on the horizon with v7 and the newest devices like Audience. Have seen reports of 1.3gb/s on these. But it's barely even beta right now.
Ruckus is pretty solid and you can usually find them used for great prices. Many units have a stand alone firmware available that negates the need for a controller.
My testing even on gigabit chipsets mirrors your 400 mbit per AP comment, at least in my situation.
https://docs.ruckuswireless.com/unleashed/200.1.9.12/c-MeshO...
If you are talking long distances you need to start looking at directional antennas...But to say..span an A-Frame house...they would do fine as others as well.
EDIT: The "Wireless Bridge Topology" is exactly what I need, here, but it's not entirely clear to me yet if I'd really need two APs on the gateway side as the picture suggests: https://docs.ruckuswireless.com/unleashed/200.1.9.12/c-Suppo...
Note: regardless of the vendor Meshing will basically 1/2 your available wireless bandwidth. Its handy to extend coverage, and you will still be able to stream netflix and probably even things like facetime etc, but you are going to be essentially inducing a half-duplex connection into your "backbone".