... & that's still ignoring arm64 is now mainstream at ARMv9.
To you point re: Friendly Elec's SKUs, I've watched Van Tech Corner (Youtube) benchmark a NanoPi R6S using WireGuard at 1.1+ Gbps. That's a Cortex-A76 with a Cortex-A55 as a 'quad core by quad core' CPU. I'm sure we all know by now that WG is a multi-threaded process so more CPU cores can only help.
The ARM Cortex-76 is a six (6) year old microarchitecture (2018).
Agreed. This is all the more important when developing for industrial applications. Even the presence of a RTC, which requires a battery that will die regardless of how many years it runs, is enough of a liability to make it a 'non-starter'/completely unfit for purpose.
I just don't have the confidence in GL.iNet to release a compelling Burme v3 when they've already been out-lapped by Friendly Elec. I'll say it again: the only benefit to it is the GUI but that's of little consequence when one can just drop in a theme like Argon onto pure/vanilla OWRT.
(Side note: 18 votes for USB-C... so we know there's at least that many out there that clapped like the trained seals they are when Apple stripped the headphone jack from their phones. JFC.)