I don’t disagree with your points 1 and 2, but IME having worked in telecom for more than a decade your point about there being no data to back it up is wrong. Probably no data that you have been privy to, yes. Your lack of exposure to data does not equate to a lack of data. IME, internal analysis of trouble tickets along with unit cost is driving most moves by an ISP to make installation and usability simple, automated, and specifically not result in support calls. Remember that 90+% of their customers have the expectation that it just works like a power utility and buy their kids’ gaming machines from Costco and Walmart. They really don’t care about config customization and prioritize the assumption that it “just works” far above their flexibility to load custom firmware.