Features:
Essential: Multiple SSIDs: a must, which I'm using now, with separate profiles and security policies each.
Essential: I need a 'guest SSID', by which I mean isolation from the wired lan apart from permitting internet access applied to clients in one SSID, ideally plus inter-client isolation, although there might be a way of doing part of this with firewall rules, not sure how much of this is best treated as a router responsibility. I am already doing rate-limiting for guests, but they are not isolated from the rest of the lan currently which is totally unsatisfactory.
Essential: 5GHz and 2.4GHz operation, plus 802.11ac Wave 2 and MU-MIMO support
Essential: beam-forming or equivalent long-range features
Essential: Must be able to set up the security settings once only per SSID group and have them synchronised across the different radios in each SSID, as I do currently. I don't have to maintain two sets of security properties and clients one for 2.4GHz and one for 5GHz and repeated for different SSIDs as currently, with the ZyXel, relevant info is entered once into one security profile object and one MAC filtering list and these objects can be re-used.
Essential: seamless handover, or whatever it's called, where devices can roam from one WAP to another properly with zero hassle, of the type that Ubiquiti claim to offer, assuming it's real.
Important: I will need several WAPs to get enough coverage, including long-range outdoor access. Easy management of multiple WAPs would be important.
Essential: MAC filtering. Which I use currently. Really need an easier way to keep this up to date, ideally across multiple WAPs - important.
I don't need radius. I'm going to use WPA2 AES PSK, as currently.
Nice: Future proofing to future standards through software upgrades would be very nice, not practical if the radios are going to have to change.
Nice: multiple radios per band would be nice
Important: being able to edit config in a text editor and then upload it, and being able to back it up easily is important, as currently I have to edit everything using a horrid web UI and backup and restore is scary.
Nice: stats, logging and performance readings. Don't have any method of finding out what's going on wrt to performance and range problems currently.
If I can't find all of the must-haves in a single model, if it's too much to ask, then I'll use a mix of models.