Sigh, okay I am trying XG again...

First of all - SFOS (and UTM) was never build to be used in a Home Network. That is the reason, some of those points are not applying to most customers (at all). The reason is: Home networks uses weird approaches to certain technologies, as most vendors of software expect to have "internet access". For example, if you look into most IoT hardware and how they work, you see weird implementations of connection technologies. 

- Why are we not allowed to edit the Exceptions lists that are built-in? Microsoft Updates are disabled by default in exceptions, and Office Updates are being blocked by default. That's a bit concerning to me.

You should look into TLS / SSL decryption instead. There is a "managed TLS exclusion List, which includes Exceptions as well. The "Exception List" you are talking about, is the "old world of standard proxy". 

- Rules and Policies are still an absolute mess to me, but the Assistant does help a little bit (a lot) with this.  Thank you for that tool built-in.

Use a LAN to WAN Policy and work your way up to a more filtered way. It is actually easy to do it compared to UTM, where you have to do the same stuff 4-5 times. Think about it like: "Allowed Networks in UTM is the firewall rule in SFOS". 

- I do a lot of gaming and I am used to having to open ports to make things work. I have yet to open a gaming port after being on XG - how is that possible? And, adding a custom port to open (HomeAssistant) was painful to get right. Does XG 'just know' what to block here? This is my big concern with this: A rogue PC/device/etc on the local LAN transmitting out to a site. It seems pretty solid for anything incoming, but outgoing I question. Perhaps I don't understand the behavior of XG in how it handles outbound traffic, but at first look it feels like everything is open and you have to close everything up, completely contradictory to what it's always been.

It is 100% the same like UTM. As long as you are not doing TLS Decryption, you can get a firewall rule, LAN to WAN, open the ports, you had on UTM and you are in the same world. But if you start to inspect the traffic with TLS decryption, most of those apps will break, due the fact above. I personally gave up on this matter, it is not possible to workaround home apps, as they are moving with firmware updates, they build weird ways to interact with servers etc. 
But the foundation of stateful firewalls are 100% the same. Create a firewall rule, include the ports and you have the app running. 

- I have an extremely large list of web ad URLs.  It appears that the only thing I can use to add this for filtering is creating categories and applying them to be blocked in my policy.  The issue I have with this is that I am only allowed 2,000 entries per category, so this isn't an effective method of blocking ads.  I had to create seven categories and add them to a policy to filter out some ads (aside from any other filtering going on).  I could have just set this up completely wrong, but was the only thing I saw where I could import text files.

Again the same answer like above - This is something, only home users are following up. Using Web categories is a way to do this, yes - But i am doing it client based (on the client itself) and not on a firewall. 

- Is there going to be any kind of allowed modifications to change the display such as the connection list?  I have a 4k monitor with a 3840 resolution.  Everything I have to scroll through to be able to see everything even with this large of a resolution because these lists don't adapt to screen sizes.

This is currently under review to rebuild the webadmin.

And to be honest, if you are a home user only, the question is, why sticking with UTM/SFOS in the first place? Other products on the market offers you a set of technologies for the home network only. You properly know the vendor namens, but it is about the use case. UTM / SFOS home is a successful tool, as people can play with the technology they are using, but it does not include modern "requirements" of the home users, which come up quite frequently. It is not the targeted market for both technologies. Just talking about stuff like builtin ADblock, Pihole integration, Wildcard LE Support, and other technologies are more frequently implemented by other sharedware. 

I'll disagree somewhat on the UTM/SFOS "not made for home use" theory. It can be configured relatively easily for home users since network topologies are simpler and you don't have to be an expert in networking to use it. It is in some cases easier to configure than pfSense/OPNsense and offers so...much....more out of the box.

LuCar Toni said:

And to be honest, if you are a home user only, the question is, why sticking with UTM/SFOS in the first place? Other products on the market offers you a set of technologies for the home network only.

What other products do you recommend for home user? I read good things about the Ubiquity Dream Machine and some very basic VPN routers. Other than that, there's not much else out there that is  like SFOS.

I'll disagree somewhat on the UTM/SFOS "not made for home use" theory. It can be configured relatively easily for home users since network topologies are simpler and you don't have to be an expert in networking to use it. It is in some cases easier to configure than pfSense/OPNsense and offers so...much....more out of the box.

LuCar Toni said:

And to be honest, if you are a home user only, the question is, why sticking with UTM/SFOS in the first place? Other products on the market offers you a set of technologies for the home network only.

What other products do you recommend for home user? I read good things about the Ubiquity Dream Machine and some very basic VPN routers. Other than that, there's not much else out there that is  like SFOS.

Some 15 or more years ago I investigated available systems for home use and decided that the UTM met my requirements, nothing else came close.

When XG was released I moved to that product because it was similar to what we were using at work and became my learning tool. So, yes the XG is a very good home security product with some limitations which I have learnt to live with.

Ian