One thing I discovered recently that has actually been around for a while is MoCA which in the current standard allows you to turn your coax cable in your home in to a 2.5 Gbps LAN. Doing something like this would allow you to drop a switch at each coax outlet in your home for ethernet distribution to that room of the house, and then you can do normal office cable management rather than having to run ethernet behind the walls.

You might price out what the adapters + switches would cost and then compare that price to what it would cost for someone to run the cable for you.

Personally I would only want the most qualified electrician who also knows details like using “plenum grade” cable to run ethernet in my home. I’ve heard way too many horror stories ranging from poor cable speeds due to damaging cables during install and miss-wiring keystone jacks, all the way to fires.

I’ve got a thin bookshelf from ikea for my data area, so I’m looking for switch/panel I can just have sat on a shelf rather than mounting in a rack

My thoughts on this are, why use a patch panel at all at this point? Are you actually wiring the cable runs to a punch-down at the patch panel, or is there going to be a bunch of keystone jacks in the “data area” (which would basically make the wall a patch-panel of sorts)?