" no version 8.2 routers are out for sale."
Correct. However there not readily available on the market. I contacted roughly 50 - 70 different sources and none of them had v8.2. It may be that I missed some if it was a person/entity that only had 1-10 available. However these low quantities are going to dry up quick as there is no significant quantities remaining anywhere. This is not an item where there were significant quantities produced with year+ time spans that used the same board. Some things you can find years later. This is not one of them. If you got lucky with one item that's fine. But it's not something realistic for most people and it's not something your going to 'get lucky' on in the near future. They were only recently discontinued and are already near-impossible to locate significant stock of.
The question on 8.x is a bit more complicated. You may not actually have a fully free router if LibreCMC works on another 8.x revision. LibreCMC is itself a distribution, and there are other components, such as the boot loader. The boards also may differ in other ways. For example some boards we tested do not have a working serial interface. Just having this board is in fact not good enough either as there are digital restrictions in the firmware. Both TP-Link and other companies have begun to use this to prevent users from re-flashing routers. Again- that isn't an issue with any of this TP-Link 8.2 router we've tested.
As I've said- we're no longer using the TP-Link router as a base. There is simply no significant stock left anywhere.
