The thread is too deep to reply direct, but you appear to be more or less agreeing. There are low powered x86 systems at that price point. pfSense has offered a software upgrade path for over a decade, and takes security advisories seriously, so how many store bought routers can boast anything close to that? pfSense also scales up to 10gbit forwarding performance. I can't really comment on the cruft, AFAIK you don't need to run an IDS and that is all in packages.