Your frustration should be with Qualcomm, not GL-Inet, GLinet simply take Qualcomm’s SDK and modify it with their apps/branding. The underlying core components are all provided by the QSDK, its true that its based on openwrt, but its not as simple as adding a couple of packages etc and typing make -j4.
Its qualcomm that should update their SDK to use a more recent openwrt version, in fact, they should ideally submit code directly to openwrt and not fork it… but since they rely on closed-source hardware acceleration and their code would never get accepted into linux, they fork and do major modifications then send those tarballs to customers like GL-inet. I guess a less ideal option would be qualcomm compiling their closed source Wifi drivers against current kernels so people using mainline openwrt can leverage the higher performance, but again their modifications affect many core parts of the network stack, its not like you can uninstall ath10k and install qsdk-wlan-driver and everything works, not that simple unfortunately.
I used to be frustrated too, but its not the vendors, its the chipset developer that is to blame (this is the same case with Asus, tplink…etc, they all use sdks provided by chipset makers).
Having said all of that, you can use mainline openwrt and with some tricks (irqbalance, assigning cores), you can reach pretty respectable performance numbers with the open source drivers.
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