Wow, lots of discussion on this! Thank all of you! I ended up going with a pair of Asus AC1900P (AC68U) routers. Bought one new & one refurb off Amazon, with the new one being the master, and the second one being the extender. Wireless mesh since hardwiring them is out of the question. $140 total for both units. I ended up loading Merlin & Skynet on them and life's good. They only have a 200Mbps/10Mbps connection so these are complete overkill and are working well.
I can't see spending more than $140 on consumer gear. At that point Ubiquiti's UniFi system is more capable and more reliable. I've put Ubnt's AirMax gear through hell & hurricanes and only lightning seems to be able to stop it. I've been using PFSense since 2006 and other than one dodgy update in 2021, it's been flawless. I can't even count how many PFSense systems I've deployed over the years. Largest one was 7,000+ users running on a consumer-grade computer and it worked amazingly well. Lately I've been using Dell R210 II servers for this. Complete overkill but they're cheap enough and reliable enough.