[topspin]

> This thing has no practical purpose.

This is wrong. OpenWRT is fostering several manufacturers that are using OpenWRT as the factory platform for their products. This is a reference design (one of several, this particular one from 2024 is now dated and newer designs are available,) provided by OpenWRT, and they've thoughtfully made it available to anyone that might want one: you can just go buy some with no NDA bullshit and get your developers moving in your lab or doing UI development or whatever. The not-cost-optimized PCB is what you want for this, in addition to the ample RAM+Flash. The "useless" POE is another aspect of this: access points use POE ubiquitously, which is a key OpenWRT use case.

[naturalmovement]

This sources PoE using a third-party daughter board which is mechanically way too big to package into any production access point. So no, that part of a reference design would never be used.

> get your developers moving in your lab or doing UI development or whatever

This is what the industry has been clamoring for among a sea of existing hardware: More garbage UIs glued atop of copy-pasted forgotten hardware.

I am an engineering manager. My job is to poke holes in money-burning projects.

[topspin]

> I am an engineering manager.

Strange. A good engineering manager would see that "way too big" PoE daughter board design as exactly what one would want in a reference design that will be used to test and integrate your preferred PoE solution. Power product life cycles are so short and availability problems so frequent that a good engineering manager knows that their engineers will be reworking power solutions with some regularity.

A good engineering manager would also know that UI development for commercial products is not optional. The engineering manager will expect that marketing will want branding at the very least, that differentiating features will need to be surfaced, etc., and that all of this will need to be integrated into build, test and the package system, and QA'd on real hardware. Basic stuff for an engineering manager.