But, as with RPi, you get to boot your own choice of OS.

In my opinion the advantage of this (=more control) easily outweighs tradeoff of not "opting in" to hardware features enabled via binary blobs.

A MIPS board that pretty much "just works" with BSD kernels. No brainer. I'll take it.

If this is your goal, then EdgeRouter X would be a much better choice. It has a faster CPU but no offloading, so it would outperform the Lite in this use case. The MSRP is also half that of the Lite.

it wouldn't because at this time there is seemingly no alternate operating system that supports it.