Here's the reason:
My home internet is 400down/30-35 up. My computers pretty fast, but to get fiber internet means we have to trust AT&T to dig up and fix THEIR cable, and charge me the same for the same bandwidth I get on my cloud. If AT&T did fix their cable, the physical cable in clay would easily break again and I'd lose connection due to their failure to protect the cable to cut corners.
I have a cloud server that's got 8c/16t (AMD Ryzen 7 3800X), 500Mbps up and down, and 128GB RAM, but the baremetal server runs 128GB of RAM. I have 3 IPs, and I don't want to run only 3 virtual machines on it.
I think its irresponsible for OPNsense to expect us to not provide a direct iso link when there's plenty of mirrors I can cancel, and turn around and copy link/paste. Heck, I could get a Windows ISO on my hypervisor faster than I could OPNSense.
To Preface, this is a struggle when I have to reinstall my ENTIRE cloud server. Windows Server is actually beating out downloading to the hypervisor than me uploading the unzipped iso. Also, I started the Windows Server 2022 download later, and its almost done.
Also, yes I do host this on my own money too!!!! Downvote me all you want.
Is your rambling about compressed images/ISO versus uncompressed? If you have a hypervisor download the compressed file to your hypervisor and uncompress it there, Proxmox can handle some compression automatically for example.