Big difference between what you might get spending $15,000 for a Juniper MX204 running JunOS and a Mikrotik $800 router. I mentally categorize Mikrotik RouterOS and similar ultra low cost things in the same tier as VyOS. It's cheap but there are tradeoffs to going cheap. One has to understand the risks and tradeoffs of running a lot of your traffic or important things through cheap routers. Sometimes it's a risk worth taking.
Foundry, as we've seen, was a straight knockoff of the IOS 12.2/12.4 CLI and interface. Used plenty of Foundry switches in a previous role.
Everything does suck. Some things suck less. Sometimes you can pay money to get things that suck less.
for a comparison, I once had an issue where both routers in a redundant setup failed within half an hour of each other. (was a pure coincidence, the setup was redundant). then, the sparefallback unit would not boot, and jtac send us a replacement within 3 HOURS...
Another point is the feature development: BGP implementation, in Mikrotik was single core only and this was a bottleneck especially when you want to calculate the full routing table. Everyone in the forum asked for this new feature, but Mikrotik always refuse to work on that.
And sometimes you pay more money and you're the one being made to do the sucking :-\
JunOS is generally better than IOS(-XR), but it’s still got its sharp edges. VyOS / Vyatta are poor enough clones that they will bite and seriously suck to anyone who’s actually got real JunOS experience.
Let’s be real. The goal in improving network configuration standards is to suck less. That’s it. Everything in networks sucks. Anyone who tells you otherwise either lacks experience in general, lacks experience suffering at the bleeding edge, or lacks my cynicism and genuinely sees the world as a better place than I do (I envy them for any of the above)