Honestly I think it's a GOOD thing to learn to install and configure your own pfSense community edition. These types of firewalls are insanely complex when compared to your typical home linksys router, and that's a good thing because options and power, but it means you need to at least be passingly familiar with how things are set up so you can more easily troubleshoot when things aren't running as planned.
Progressing from a blank box to something that functions on the surface like a plain home router only takes a few minutes on powerful hardware like they use, and you have so much more capability available to you.
Using a preinstalled box as shipped robs you of valuable experience that will come in handy when it's time to move your pfSense config to another box or install for whatever reason.
Personally I have a low powered standalone box available as a backup to my pfSense VM, and it's trivial to take a backup config from the VM, change a couple entries to correspond to the correct ethernet ports on the hardware box, and bring it back up just like nothing changed, including all my static IP's, firewall NAT rules, all my complex configurations intact. Try that trick when moving from an asus to a linksys home router.
I personally wouldn't want a netgate hardware product, they upcharge the hardware drastically to cover their support. Protectli at least looks to provide a quite competitive price on their hardware and will support OPNsense if you don't want to learn a new skill.
I always recommend learning new skills, keeps the brain young.