[wstrange]

"unnecessarily wasteful energy-wise"

This is just for setup right? So the energy cost is insanely trivial, hardly worth mentioning.

[TeMPOraL]

I'm making a general point here. In case of this router, one-time expense is indeed hardly worth mentioning. I just dislike the whole trend.

[londonsexplorer]

The general point is "local direct communication is hard and unreliable". Your phone falls back to 3G - connection broken. You're on "HouseWifi" and the other device is on "HouseWifi_5Ghz" - connection broken. You have a router with a guest mode and stops guests accessing the local LAN - guest can't print or chromecast or whatever.