As long as there are no hardware backdoors openwrt should overwrite firmware/software ones.

Mikrotik is such pain in the dick. Not used them in the last 5 years but hated working with them in the past.

PhDs are hard, don’t get discouraged if you get told to rewrite tons of things. My Dad had to rewrite many parts to his dissertation, the arbitrary nature of the rewrites was the hardest part to deal with for him. Hopefully you have better advisors!

Good Luck Luka!

I feel like I’m a minority in this group in that I really don’t like self hosting but I do it anyways because it gives me the things I want from a content/privacy/control/ownership perspective.