I have many nerdy friends who have been Linux users for ages. But most of them don't know such a thing as Openwrt exists or have never bothered to give it a try. It's a very fun piece of software to play with and can be extremely useful for routing traffic. Wondering why it isn't more popular/widely used.
Nowadays you can easily run it on a single board computer like the raspberry pi or any x86 mini pcs. You just need to hook up an access point for Wi-Fi which doesn't need to be able to run openwrt.