Most of the more advanced gateways have some sort of DNS filtering built in. Opnsense has an adguard plugin, pfsense has pfblocker-ng, openwrt has a few different options, Unifi and mikrotik both have solutions too I think. Usually you can just load the same block list that pihole uses into the filtering software and you are good to go.
If you want the most flexibility and want to use the same hardware for both gateway/DNS and want to try out different DNS/router solutions a hypervisor would give you the most options. But it would also be the most complicated.
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To the dev, your game has motivated me to learn flutter/dart. I've been working with it for four months now and I'm getting close to finishing my first app, so thank you for the inspiration!
The book "I will teach you to be rich" has a great overview of how to best leverage credit cards, high yield savings accounts, setting up automatic investments, saving, and lots of other 'good to know' topics about money.
For investing specifically I use the Boglehead method.
Another solution is to use NAT on the router. NAT all traffic from the client network 11.0/24 to the routers IP on the server network 10.0/24.
That way when the server sees the ICMP echoes on its 10.102 network it will look like it came from the router and send the reply back together router instead out its other interface.
Are you sure you are typing the address in correctly on android/ios? 198.162.x.x isnt part of private IP space.
If you're looking for a more mature networking setup, I would definitely recommend splitting up your router, switch and AP duties into separate devices. It gives you the most flexibility for when you want to tinker or change things.
For a main router setup, I would recommend OpnSense. It's has a cloud backup feature which allows you to automatically backup the configuration to a Google Drive xml file whenever it is changed.
The XML config file stores all your leases so you don't have to worry about reassigning DHCP reservations. If you load the config onto a new system, like for an upgrade or if the router hardware fails, usually you just have to change the interface mappings and you're good to go.
As far as APs/switches, I would recommend Unifi or Mikrotik. Unifi has a fancy dashboard you can use to adopt new equipment and restore/change configs from, but I find Mikrotik easier and simpler to backup and I like that i dont have to host a controller to make config changes.
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For those who don't know much about him, I recommend watching the movie Revolution OS. It does a good job showing what he was working towards.
The official framework mainboard 3d printed case uses a compliant mechanism to push the power button, you can take at look at the open source STL files to see how they designed it for inspiration/reference.
https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13/tree/main/Mainboard/Printable%20Case
I do something similar with opnsense and policy based routing. opnsense is acting as both a VPN client and server. The client interface connects out to a commercial VPN, and the server interface listens for incoming connections. Based on what I I want to accomplish I setup firewall rules that use policy based routing to route incoming VPN traffic where it needs to go.
Regarding split tunnel on the client, the Android wireguard app has the option to specify what traffic uses the tunnel based on the application
Both opnsense and pfsense allow custom DNS entries so you still have that as an option. Probably the other options do too but you'll just have to verify.
But if you want to keep it simple I would just keep the pihole as a separate device. A lot of the built in options aernt quite as easy to setup and don't have the best UI compared to pihole IMO.