Selfhosted

I recently moved to shared housing and they have a very poor Wifi 4 router located quite far from my room (no chance of wiring ethernet). As I'd like to host some (local) services for myself, I brought a Tp-Link Archer C6 (v3.2) with me to mess with. I had set up WDS successfully on the stock firmware to get a much better internet connection in my room,, but it was finnicky and sometimes drop out entirely for hours. As I knew my router has good support from OpenWrt, I decided to flash it tonight and "quicky re-do the WDS setup". It's been over 5 hours and I've had no luck getting it to connect following the wiki's guide. I also tried making a relayd-based access point, but it doesn't seem to route to ethernet and when I tried connecting with my phone it just stays on "Obtaining IP address..."

I feel very much out of my depth.. is there an easier way to achieve this? Basically, my ideal end result would be having a better/more consistent wifi connection (which I think works because the router has much stronger antennae than my laptop or phone) and ethernet, with OpenWrt available to toy with and learn more about networking.