>the average person will never install a 3rd party firmware

Heres a kicker. I really dont care about the average person. I care about multimillion dollar stacks of hardware that have support rug pulled on them, leaving millions of customers stuck. I care about small businesses that invest in their communities and find themselves locked into a single vendor without the cost to overhaul their network to move to another one.

Throw your Dlink home router in the bin every 3 years. I literally dont care.

>Ideally we should just be designing products so they don't have external dependencies.

This is good too. But even then, I would apply this logic to stuff like Meraki, where major features go away if you dont buy the license. Lightbulbs are beneath my notice/contempt.