I think I’ve hit upon the ideal (for me) setup of the firewall.
The internet connection will look something like this:

Internet –> Cable Modem –> pfsense router (as VM) –> Dlink 524? router –> LAN

The main reason for this setup is redundancy. If the VM dies, or the VM server goes down, I can very quickly go to this alternate setup:

Internet –> Cable Modem –> Dlink 524? router –> LAN

by just plugging the cable modem in to the dlink router instead of pfsense software firewall.
The router will take case of assigning IP addresses, so that feature needs to be disabled in pfsense (so there’s no fighting)
With this setup I can have control of the data that goes out on the net (shape it anyway I want with pfsense) and still have the flexibility to remove it from the chain, without making ANY setup changes to keep the network connectivity going (Very important, in order to keep a high WAF)