Seconding this, I do the same. It's a terrible sign that it took me longer to figure out how to successfully create VLANs and assign them to SSIDs in OpenWRT, which is a fairly simple concept, than it took me to learn basically anything about OPNSense, a vastly more powerful and complex tool.
I appreciate OpenWRT for giving me FOSS firmware I can slap on my AP, and I certainly don't want to come across as entitled to the free labor of the developers, but it's just objectively not very good from a UI/UX perspective.
I have no idea how you're getting packages older than Debian. Unstable is a rolling release and stable has a 6 month release cadence with no LTS. Were you pulling from an old dead repo? If you followed an outdated guide, they probably linked you to an old one.
I do agree that the learning curve is steep and the knowledge is nontransferrable though. In my case, that just encouraged me to unify all my systems onto NixOS at home. Not sure if that's a solution or addiction yet.