Pfsense is in no way more hardened than a OpenWRT box. Both are vastly superior to the stock firmware on any soho router available. OpenWRT and pfsense come from different backgrounds, OpenWRT was intended as a replacement firmware for consumer wifi routers, while pfsense wanted to be a secure and easy to use firewall appliance on x86 hardware.

We use both, OpenWRT on cheap TPLink consumer routers as a VPN router in home and branch offices, and a bunch of virtualized pfsense firewalls for network security in our hq and datacenter rack.

If you're after real routers as in routing protocols like bgp and ospf and not security devices, both are not of much use. this is where vyatta, a open source Debian based router distribution is better suited.

Wireless performance of openwrt depends on the hardware it is running on, but It's generally not great compared to proprietary gear from ubiquity and mikrotik. Both make dirt cheap wireless gear and routers that can match and outperform Cisco routers that cost 10x more. Wireless ISPs everywhere rely on those vendors.