Openwrt is so nice. Despite small teams and budgets, they power so many routers and are also good at research and new features. The sqm/fq_codel stuff alone makes it worth running openwrt. If you are not familiar with it, go to dslreports.com and run a speedtest. If you get a poor bufferbloat score, openwrt can help. A lot of vendors (even big enterprise ones) use openwrt builds for their products, but don't provide…
wrt bufferbloat: my internet is too fast (150 mbps) for a cheap router to effectively manage the connection, meaning that unless i pay 250€ for a router, I will just slow down my Internet needlessly.
The Netgear R7800, while a bit more expensive ($150), is still cheaper than the price you mention, and is very powerful and able to handle gigabit speeds easily.