-
I've used deco with powerline as backhaul and it worked reasonable well to create a faster mesh- the powerline adapters weren't super stable and I think I had to fiddle with the mode the decos connected in to improve stability (AP vs modem? but I can't remember which sorry!)
I've also tried powerline with same SSID and password and it doesn't work t anywhere near as well as mesh - your device will hang on to a very weak signal rather than connect to the new network with same SSID and password automatically.
I'd fork out for the deco for sure unless the garage is far enough away you will lose connection to the main house network and your devices will just reconnect to what is available.
Hmm, I assumed that using an M9 as the main node would create one mesh that used two means of communication (power line backhaul for m9-m9, WiFi backhaul for m9-m4)