I can see you are trying to get everyone to agree with you or talk you into pfSense as the God product of all time, but that's not going to happen. They each have their strengths.
That's really not it at all. I've been trying to determine those strengths you mentioned! You pretty well summed it up there, just perfectly:
pfsense -> firewall
untangle -> UTM
It sounds like both dabble around in each others respective territories a bit, but both are better in their own area.
Now I know that I can get a little more into the pfsense stuff. Untangle probably seems to me to be more hardware intensive because UTM is naturally more hardware intensive than firewall. Makes perfect sense. So now I'm curious what exactly falls into the realm of firewall and what falls into the realm of UTM.
My original post intentions sum up to:
router/gateway
QoS
vpn
blocking nasties (content filtering)
blocking ads (also content filtering?)
IM logging
virus scanning/intrusion prevention
Which of these things should I be doing with pfsense, which with untangle?
tr3