Bumping this because I'm thinking about getting a system. Is there a consensus Best pick? Thinking the Orbi
I bit the bullet and bought Orbi router + 1 satellite pack just after Christmas when it became available in Canada, partly due to Google not selling their routers up here. For me it works as advertised. On initial setup it took the satellite a few minutes to find the router, establish a connection, and update its firmware. I was getting a little nervous with how long that took, but I didn't have to intervene and from there it has had 100% uptime with zero intervention required from me.
I have a long, narrow house and this solved my wifi problems completely. I put the router in my networking closet in the basement (near the rear of my house), and the satellite in my kitchen on the main floor, fairly centrally located front-to-back. There are no dropouts walking all over the house, and signal strength is full bars everywhere. Latency between this and my previous wifi is night and day. All bedrooms are good, as is the garage, and previously my most problematic area: my front porch where I have a Ring Pro doorbell that always struggled for wifi signal pre-Orbi. It is so nice to not have to worry about any of this cutting out any more.
In my experience, Orbi is somehow way more seamless, faster, and reliable than having multiple wifi access points connected through wired ethernet, despite the mesh connection between satellite and router. I like that it still has a browser-accessible settings page too, even if it's not as full-featured as what I had with Tomato firmware on my previous router. Many other mesh setups can only be configured with a mobile app (a negative for me), and it's not like those apps have Tomato or DD-WRT-level settings anyway.
One knock against Orbi is that if you have a really spread out house and want a second satellite, my understanding is that the satellites can't mesh with each other. They each connect directly to the router. So if you have a router at one end of your house, you can't presently benefit from the signal hopping across a satellite to reach a satellite very far away. I believe Netgear is working on firmware to allow that, but it isn't implemented yet the last I checked.
If that isn't a factor for you, I can totally recommend Orbi without reservation. It even looks good on the counter in my modern kitchen. For the foreseeable future, whenever I'm asked for a wifi recommendation, this will be it.