@Clive_A honestly, the only feature I wanted - needed, which wasn't present was PXE support.

I'd been given 2 rounds of assurances the changes would go in, so as the tickets I'd opened for this were closed, I assumed it was a sure thing.  I was more than a little upset when that didn't appear to be the case.

That said, see my followup -- PXE support *DOES* exist, but only with a specially crafted options string, which isn't documented anywhere I could find.  I figured it out primarily by beating on the config and trying more and more obscure things, until i found the right combination.

If I'd known this worked (I don't know when this became the case, i thought i'd tried this on a much earlier firmware and it failed), I would've happily thanked the devs, made my config changes, and gone back to using the systems.  I didn't, so my reaction was as shown above.

I've since updated the ticket with support notifying them of the combination that works, asking that they drop it in a document, and to close my open ticket(s).

I've updated the original post to point to the solution, I imagine at least one other business owner out there 1) uses tp link routers and 2) needs PXE support.

  @greenaar Is this in stand alone mode? I can't find the option anywhere in Controller mode and option 66 simply gets ignored by the computers I have, instead they all refer to the next server information in the DHCP ACK packet.