[m86]

Personally,

-General device testing is well served at SmallNetBuilder (the octoBox test environment used now is awesome), though the stock FW is obviously tested more often than not

-Ubiquiti gear is indeed pretty rad

-Old Broadcom-based gear is still holding up well for low throughput use using Tomato + variants (.. or even DD-WRT)

-I would probably avoid 11ac models for now (unless you have a compelling reason not to).. but if you do decide to go that route, the BCM470(8/9)x SoCs are Cortex-A9 based [versus the single-core MIPS based BCM4706]

.. for a bit more data, a somewhat thorough overview of available hardware is available via the below WD query (in table form)..

http://wikidevi.com/w/index.php?title=Special%3AAsk&q=%3Cq%3...