I'm going to try my hardest not to make this a rant post, but it's difficult to say I'm not frustrated.

First off, the only reason I bought this router and want OpenWRT is so I can install WireGuard and run Cloudflare Warp on a network level. Say what you want, but I like the idea of keeping my IP and location, but still encrypting traffic. It's free and I find it to be fast. Plus I know this isn't the best router on the planet, but it seemed like a great value. It was $35 refurbished on Amazon and also seems to get a lot of praise. Plus installing OpenWRT was really simple.

Anyway, long story short I installed OpenWRT, noticed the download speed was really slow but the upload wasn't for some reason. Spent 9 hours straight researching, changing settings, bricking and unbricking the router multiple times. All of this time wasted just to find out all I had to do was enable software and hardware offloading and it finally fixed my download speeds to normal (250-ish MBPS).

However, still, the connection is insanely unstable. So unstable that I can't even run a full speed test without it dropping for no reason. Doesn't matter if I'm on ethernet or WiFi. Hell, for all I know the upload speeds could be really bad. it won't let me make it that far in the test to find out. I should get around 50MBPS up. As a matter of fact it seems to be so bad now I can't get an internet connection at all. The only reason I'm stopping for the night is because the 2 half speed tests I managed to do had full download speed (and I double checked which WiFi I was on to make sure). So that was a big accomplishment of my basically blindfolded 9 hour endeavor.

So please, if anyone could help me out and explain things like I'm 5 years old, that would be great. I want to figure out why the connection is so unstable and fix it.