Depending on your forecasted capacity needs, Ubiquity does have some attractive options depending on your comfort with managed vs unmanaged switches is. I am making some assumptions based on homelab tendencies. I have been very happy with the UniFi ecosystem personally, though I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. The Dream Machine Pro has been very good for me both operationally and reliability wise, and there are expansion options for 10Gb Ethernet or SFP+ switches that cover most (pro/prosumer) price ranges.
They are definitely not the best bang for buck necessarily, and I have not tried any MikroTik alternatives to directly compare so take my opinions with a big grain of salt. I work in a purely Cisco environment and am used to working almost exclusively in CLI, but I found the UniFi GUI and environment easy enough to pick up with a little effort. UniFi firewall is too permissive by default if you are using something like the Dream Machine as the front end, but as a Boundary non-expert it was not too difficult to configure satisfactorily. Wireless APs are pretty great too.
You should if you want to be a science writer or academic, which lets be honest is a better comparison here. If your job involves latin for names and descriptions then you probably should take at least a year or two of latin if you don’t want to make mistakes here and there out of ignorance.