I'll start by pointing out that I am a fan of 8-port routers.

At the time I bought the RT-AC88U, the ROG Rapture was not yet out. That form factor router was limited to the 4-port RT-AC5300. The Rapture came out not too much later, however, and I was sad to see that I could have had everything I wanted, as the only thing that pushed me to the 88 was port capacity. It's been a good router, but I definitely need the expanded memory and extra cores for all of the downloading that I do on the router (let's face it, the downloading interface is really slow and really buggy and almost requires you to use Merlin instead).

So, now that the new batch of routers is out, namely the RT-AX88U and the Rapture GT-AX11000, there is the same port disparity whereby the obviously higher end model has fewer wired ports. Is this trend going to repeat itself, where we will see an 8-port rapture come out soon?