> what I am suggesting can be had for around $350 with

Expensive, you know.
a Mikrotik 1100 AHx2 costs 434, a 1200 costs 303 USD.
Both likely kill your part - and have integrated significant switch ports (which are hardware switched).
The 420GL costs about 52 USD and has 4 or 5 ports

And enough horsepower as a ROUTER to route 100mbit - gets worse with a LOT of firewall rules (which you do not have) and VPN (due to encryption).
The 450G is a little below 100 USD ; + enclosure (damn, can not find a price in the USA for the integrated part - they do sell that from MIkrotik, though). It has a 680mhz processor, integrated switch for 4 ports and is full passive.
That is why I mean your stuff is expensive. They really kill the price side.
On the upper end there is a nice 12 port gigabit router coming capable of handling FULL SPEED ON ALL PORTS with significant logic behind, thanks to a 36 core special processor

Price for that is around the 1500 to 1800 USD level, but then - that really hits large setups with a 1gbit uplink

Cloud backbone style for smaller clouds
