and you are saying you are not a networking nerd
nicely done, you also could only use one cable with multiple vlan and a proper router/firewall (trunking in cisco terms, well i needed to check online because it has been way too long i have not used vlan).
i was talking about your old system maybe acting as one big switch.
and to be honest does not sound that clunky to me, having 2 vlan on the 2 ports allow for maximum speed, if you had 10 it would make sense to trunk them and propagate them between switches but for a small setup you just lose redundancy. (if you were to trunk and aggregate you would be able to lose a port or cable, pretty useless at the home level
)
and i hate that trunking can also be to aggregate... quite annoying for communication above when i say trunk i mean the cisco term, so putting multiple VLAN through one link, and when i say aggregate i mean to use multiple links as one