@the-ninth - Welcome Robert; happy to help.
@L&LD - We're only looking at Linksys
APs here (specifically the LAPAC1200's); not routers. I presume the OP has a separate, discrete routing/firewall solution (hopefully business/community grade). Also, a cloud-accessible control plane is not the devil some make it out to be; at least not when its properly deployed and designed into your architecture (such that you're not screwed if it ever goes down, which is what I think you were insinuating, so we're actually advocating for the same level of caution in that regard). While these APs might be a notch under other SMB options, they appear to review decently and I'm sure they function well enough. That said, there are certainly higher-end options out there, and Ruckus is one of them, but the OP doesn't automatically want that instead; if he's price-sensitive enough to not want to invest $300-1200 per AP (as most would be), then there are other lower-cost options that may make more sense for this use-case.
Although I don't have direct experience with them, from the research I did, it appears the control-plane is simultaneously available from the local master AP (at bare-minimum) and cloud portal (if you chose to use it), so if for some reason their cloud went down and/or the housing community had a WAN outage, you could still administrate the APs locally or from afar via an out-of-band WAN plus a VPN -- as reachable as any other business-grade offering.
That said, I might be inclined to look at some other APs from some names with a bit more pedigree, just for comparison if nothing else. I really liking Cisco CBW right now. An equivalent AP would be the
CBW140AC (~$110 each). CBW runs a trimmed-down version of Cisco's enterprise Mobility Express controller (in fact, the 140AC appears to be an Aironet 1815i in sheep's clothing, at least according to
this Reddit post), so it should be very solid. Available locally via an identical master/slave type of setup, plus Cisco does offer the ability to host your own Business Dashboard portal via a cloud provider if you want to (but don't provide it free, in-house like Linksys does).
Happy to help answer any more questions.