Asus RT-AX88U and Asus RT-AX58U

[kage]

Last week I cancelled my order on the Amplifi Alien Router due to being a backorder. Over a month ago, I tried out the RT-AX58U with the stock firmware and I returned it due to my laptop with WiFi 5 had a difficulties connecting to the RT-AX58U 5GHz band, even though I set my laptop's WiFi to force 5GHz in the adapter settings, but with the 2.4GHz band there was no issue and it had several disconnections. My laptop works fine with my Apple Airport Extreme Router on both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHZ channels.

Yesterday, I received the RT-AX88U and I updated to the latest stock firmware. It has the same issue has the RT-AX58U with 5 GHz band with my laptop. I also have requested a return on this router from Amazon.com. I decided to enable smart connect after I requested the return. I left most on default values. The only values I changed in smart connect are:
2.4 GHz Band
Channel Bandwidth: 20/40 MHz
Control Channel: 6

5 GHz Band
Channel Bandwidth: 20/40/80 MHz
Control Channel: 149

With these settings, my laptop does not have any issues in connecting to the 5 GHz band and my other devices don't have any connection issues. Now I'm really thinking that the RT-AX88U maybe an overkill for my setup and that I should just return it and repurchase the RT-AX58U. I don't play online games. My setup consists of this:
ISP: Spectrum 100 Mbps/10 Mbps
Square Footage: Approx 1000
WiFi 6 Devices: 0
WiFi 5 Devices: 5
WiFi 4 Devices: 1
WiFi 3 Devices: 1

What is your recommendation? Should I keep the RT-AX88U? Repurchase the RT-AX58U?

 

[kage]

I decided to return the RT-AX88U since its an huge overkill for my setup. I decided to repurchase the RT-AX58U and will install the Merlin Firmware.