Comment by ssl-3

It's all good. Lightness certainly does have advantages in many circumstances -- I've got some projects in the works that use ESP32s and Pi Picos. But once I set them up, I never want to touch the code again; adjustments will be made in "userland" using a web UI. (Remember, I don't want to be a programmer when I grow up.)

Thanks to these discussions here in these threads, I've upgraded my Raspberry Pi 4 router-box (which has cheerfully been running OpenWRT for years) to the latest stable OpenWRT. It took some time to get this done but it is done, and I managed to get it done without tossing my existing configuration or disabling the household's Internet access for more than a few tens of seconds at a time.

And I've also gone through the NTP config on that router, which [previously] was never quite right -- mostly, due to complications with BusyBox also knowing how to be ntpd (ffs) and poor system documentation (which I think I may spend some time improving).

Sure, there's other ways to do all of these things... but Raspberry Pis are fun for me in ways that other hardware (black-box streaming devices, black-box routers, even black-box GPS clocks) lack. I even take one or two of them car camping with me, where their somewhat unique ease of downloading and flashing an entire pre-configured specialized system image onto a different easily-swapped, inexpensive SD card can be tremendously useful[0].

[0]: Stuff I can't do with an MCU, or with a regular PC. "Oh, this carefully-prepped LibreELEC Kodi can't work for Movie Night in the Woods because the USB stick I carefully copied a bunch of movies to is somehow empty and the data that should be there is nearly three hours away? Let's just take that card out (preserving that configuration completely), and follow the directions to get a decent Plex client working the Right Way on a different cheap-like-chips SD card. I can do all of this from my phone."