I have a Mikrotik HAP AClite. It's a great OS, I love the techy admin and shell access; it's great as a router, and rock solid (haven't needed to reboot it since I bought it last year).
But as much as I admire it, I can't recommend it as a wifi access point. It doesn't have an external antenna, and its performance compared to consumer routers is pretty mediocre. I have it running in my office, and in my living room (5m away, only a single wall between them) my AppleTV and Xbox One would continually drop out. Installed my old Asus RT-N56U as an access point connected to the Mikrotik via Ethernet, and haven't had an issue since.
Admittedly, I never tried fiddling with it to see if different channels or settings might work better.
If you haven't even tried different wifi channels, it's not a valid critique, is it? Especially for such a complicated device that doesn't do any handholding for you.
You wouldn't expect to buy a Cisco box, for example, plop it down and automagically do everything without serious time invested in configuring it.
I agree the consumer models tend to be underpowered. My first Mikrotik was the RB951-2n, which maxed out at 15 dBm (32 mW) and dropped to 9 dBm (8 mW) at max speed (150 Mbps). The hAP ac lite you own is thankfully around ~6 dBm more powerful, but that's still a little weak for thick walls.
I've since upgraded to the hAP ac, which ranges from 29 dBm (800 mW) down to 25 dBm (320 mW). That extra ~15 dBm does make a huge difference penetrating walls. (The RB951*-2HnD models are similarly high-powered if you only care about 2.4 GHz.)
A couple tricks I've used to increase link reliability through walls are to disable short guard interval (to protect better against reflections), and to disable higher bitrates (to avoid excessive failed retries). Those have made my WDS link through 4 walls pretty stable.
But as much as I admire it, I can't recommend it as a wifi access point. It doesn't have an external antenna, and its performance compared to consumer routers is pretty mediocre. I have it running in my office, and in my living room (5m away, only a single wall between them) my AppleTV and Xbox One would continually drop out. Installed my old Asus RT-N56U as an access point connected to the Mikrotik via Ethernet, and haven't had an issue since.
Admittedly, I never tried fiddling with it to see if different channels or settings might work better.