If you care about stability, most modern consumer routers are really good these days.

The hAP ac2 and ac3 are not fast either. Most mid-range WiFi 6 routers have a much faster CPU with much better NAT performance.

Unless you love to tinker around, getting a typical consumer router is more practical.

Yeah, go for it. I am like you. Nothing in a consumer level router scares me. Then buy Mikrotik and thought what have I got myself into. Lucky got this thread, plenty of guides here and Google.

But seriously, steep learning curve yes but not for a basic Unifi setup. Basic setup is kacang putih. It's only when you want to start doing more with the router, that's when you need to break-out the search engine and wake up dormant parts of your brain.

btw, what speed is your internet? This will determine how powerful your router needs to be. But for basic setup, RB750Gr3, hAP AC2 or hAP AC3 all can do handle 1Gbps. Since you're using mesh AP, just get non-wifi RB750Gr3 to save a bit of money. hAP AC2 and AC3 are more or less the same routing speed. Both are faster than the RB750Gr3. If need more power, can go for RB4011 or RB5009. I'm using the RB5009 now having just upgraded from hAP ac2 and RB750Gr3 before that. Plus side: the RB5009 can be used as a weapon.

Im on 300Mbps.Hap Ac2 would not do CAKE  @300Mbps (fast track disable,wash 'on',diffserv 4) if you are planning to use it.
Just my 2 cents

Its a tool to combat bufferfloat.Just do a test using flent,maybe you dont need CAKE or other type of aqm.

Normally I would look at routing speed in terms of bandwidth, Mbps and packets per second, pps. Also RAM. Well seeded torrent is a good test to stress a router. You can check the performance specs of MikroTik routers on their respective product page.

For normal user, if using Fasttrack (aka cut through forwarding, hardware NAT, NAT Boost, etc), even old RB750GL can handle 500Mbps.

CAKE is a type of queue in RouterOS7. You can read more about it here. (https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/Queues). But don't worry about this too much. More advanced queues tend to be more CPU intensive. I just use the default only-hardware-queue.

Here's a page on buffer-bloat. https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/...or_Bufferbloat/

Bufferbloat is like a traffic jam which results in increased latency when there's heavy sustained network traffic. For home users, chances are you'll only see this during speedtests, the occasional Steam download or a well seeded torrent.