"Most home users" are never going to install OpenWRT on anything, RPi, or otherwise. Of those that do, it seems likely that they will max out the throughput of a RPi, especially now that >100Mbps internet is common place is some countries, and is becoming increasingly available in others (like the US).
There are some RPi like boards with a single GigE, but they suffer from having smaller developer communities, and still come up short on IO when compared to a networking platform, which will typically have 1-2GigE lanes to the SoC, integrated 2 or 3 stream 2.4 GHz WiFi and a 1-2x miniPCIe interfaces.
Right now, probably the cheapest most capable router is the Ubiqti EdgeRouterX for $50 (no wifi though). It has a 2 core/4 thread MIPS CPU that can do ~1Gbps NAT/ROuting with hardware offloads and ~500Mbps just using the CPU and DMA hardware.
The RPi is tied to the 12-24 month product cycles of consumer electronics devices.
That's great in that it means relatively frequent upgrades. Though at this point, the RPi3 is a very unbalanced system. Particlarly, as others have noted, with regards to network I/O.
Router platforms are tied to the lifecycles of networking standards. The underlying standards change much more slowly, roughly ~5-10 years for major changes. The router SoCs and WiFi chips change somewhat more quickly, but not as quickly as consumer electronics SoCs.
This slow rate of change is probably a good thing for OpenWRT/LEDE, because it means that there is more time for software support to mature for each hardware generation.
Your point about the diversity of the router hardware ecosystem is an important one, and from what I can tell, makes up a significant portion of the OpenWRT project.
I think though that the "industry" work on QoS and rate control has been pretty dismal and counter-productive. The major improvements in QoS in OpenWRT didn't come from the router industry, and the router industry hasn't been speedy about incorporating it. Fixes for queuing and rate control in the WiFi stack are also coming from outside (when they come), and who knows how long they will take to get mainstreamed.
Loading even more functionality into the kernel is at odds with security, stability and maintainability. Its also not going to save much/any in the way of resources.
Your analysis seems predicated on your own ignorance of the OpenWRT project, and human nature.
How many system-level developers do you know who'd throw themselves into creating a new project, hashing out the governance, etc unless the alternative was even worse? I know, roughly, none.
I'm an OpenWRT user, not a developer, and it seemed pretty clear, even from that distance, that there was something broken given the way infrastructure problems were (or weren't) dealt with earlier this year.
I recognize many of the developers committed to the new project, and my understanding from others is that the new project includes many of the most active OpenWRT developers.
Clearly it would be better if they didn't feel this fork was necessary, but for now, I think this fork is promising.
As others have said, it sounds like you are burned out and depressed.
There are various ways to recover, but there is a good chance it will happen again unless you make some changes.
A good start would be revisiting your dream.
How old were you when your dream took hold? It sounds like the seeds were planted when you were a kid and probably in full bloom by the time you got to college, and was in hand what, within 5 years of graduating?
And then what happened? You got an inkling that your dream and reality weren't well aligned. Still, you held on to the dream, blamed circumstances, and tried a new project, but that didn't do the trick.
It doesn't seem though like you've considered the obvious: of course reality doesn't match your dream, your dream was conceived by a teenager! Of course you were off the mark!
Forgive yourself for not having it all figured out. Realize that the stuff that you thought was so important and interesting was only part of the picture. Realize that your previous enthusiasm wasn't wasted, that many of the things you invested in still matter, but that you have gaps to fill.
Realize too that missing the mark with your dream is actually a huge opportunity, because that old dream was limited by your narrow experience. You now know more about the world. You now realize that there are whole aspects of the world that you are ignorant of.
Think of how much you have to learn, how much you have to discover! Realize that this takes a huge burden off you, off your work, your career. Work doesn't have to be the source of all the meaning in your life. Realize that its Ok if some days, weeks, or even months, you are just working for the paycheck, just working so you can find meaning in something else.
Once you've changed the place your work occupies in your life, don't be surprised if you find yourself looking forward to it again.
As for how to get there? Start changing things in your life, anything at all, but particularly things that bring you into contact with new people. Every little change you make shifts your perspective. With enough shifts, you'll suddenly realize that you see new horizons where before you only saw a blank wall.
Oh, and you are right, a lot of things in software are unnecessarily complex, the result of people not learning from the mistakes of the past, of people adding abstraction to hide complexity, only to produce more complexity, of people who don't know what they don't know ignorantly, arrogantly forging ahead, and, of course, the detritus of shifting business strategies in a shifting landscape. Some of this is inevitable, but that doesn't mean that there aren't opportunities to clean up some messes and avoid making new ones.
Good luck, you've got time to figure things out, until you don't, at which point, you aren't.
For a given generation of lithium battery cell and management technology, there is the option of trading off between capacity and durability.
Field-replaceable laptop batteries are engineered as a consumable, and runtime, weight and charging speed are given priority over long life. Laptops with integrated batteries make a somewhat different tradeoff, but still assume that battery replacement will be a maintenance expense for some users. In both cases, the expected average lifetime of the laptop itself is also a factor, which I'd guess would be about 5 years, max.
Packs for laptops make different tradeoffs vs packs for a car, or home power storage. From memory, based on some back of envelope calculations, tesla trades 15-20% of nominial capacity of the cells in their auto packs for >=4x or greater durability. Packs for home energy storage would probably make similar tradeoffs, and might get more life with less aggressive charging rates.
The idea that some people fetishize disruption and heads-you-loose, tails-I-win situations baffles me. The utility has expenses beyond the cost of power generation. They don't exist to provide a subsidy to cool upstarts. They provide critical infrastructure for those cool upstarts and everyone else.
There are certainly a lot of perverse incentives and inefficiencies in the current model. Even so, its either ignorant, childish, or intellectually dishonest to act like it is outrageous that a utility has a simplified pricing model that doesn't accommodate the outliers among the outliers (residential customers with large solar and battery installations), or that their overall pricing allows margin for cost recovery and profit on power they deliver, whatever the source.
There are some RPi like boards with a single GigE, but they suffer from having smaller developer communities, and still come up short on IO when compared to a networking platform, which will typically have 1-2GigE lanes to the SoC, integrated 2 or 3 stream 2.4 GHz WiFi and a 1-2x miniPCIe interfaces.
Right now, probably the cheapest most capable router is the Ubiqti EdgeRouterX for $50 (no wifi though). It has a 2 core/4 thread MIPS CPU that can do ~1Gbps NAT/ROuting with hardware offloads and ~500Mbps just using the CPU and DMA hardware.