On the other hand, they would sell it with direct support for real OpenWrt, while many other manufacturers, including FriendlyElec, often publish franken-Linux distros that force users to resort to others such as Armbian and DietPi to be sure their OS doesn't become obsolete and unsupported in a few years.
I don't feel like it really needs to compete on price though. As long as it's not totally unreasonable, I (and I assume other OpenWRT enthusiasts) would gladly pay a premium for a device that includes truly first class OpenWRT support.
The difference is that OpenWrt has the entire source code available, and unlike those franken-distros, it is built as vanilla linux + a set of patches. As long as there is enough interest, anyone can rebase these patches on top of a newer mailine kernel. For example some Ubnt XW boards recently got an update to 23.05 after being stuck on 19.07.
I have been looking for an open source replacement for the Elecom WRH-583BK2-S is there anything in there? It's a W65 x D35 x H20.5 (mm), dual LAN, 802.11ac router.
https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...
On the other hand, they would sell it with direct support for real OpenWrt, while many other manufacturers, including FriendlyElec, often publish franken-Linux distros that force users to resort to others such as Armbian and DietPi to be sure their OS doesn't become obsolete and unsupported in a few years.