I spend a lot of time not having any idea whether I'm winning or losing the battle against wifi.  I think my confusion stems from the fact that while we are attempting things that seemingly nobody has done before (roaming and super high speeds on residential wifi networks with no controls on client software), our devices are failing at the parts people have done before (moving packets back and forth, 1000ms delays, etc).

It's possible that in fact, the reason most people are happy with their existing wifi setups is they've rearranged a bunch of random variables until it finally "worked", for their particular combination of devices, needs, and preferences.  It could be something as simple as owning a wifi router with an antenna propagation pattern that happens to work well with their bookshelf.  As soon as you change anything, you risk breaking it.  So these things that seem "simple" about residential wifi... perhaps they were never simple.

Or maybe we just suck at this :)  I'm hoping it's the other one.