&gt; &quot;and in general things only look stable for routers that are at least two years old, with newer routers having regular, massive regressions.&quot;<p>Yep. New hardware is shipped first with proprietary drivers, then shitty open-source code dumps. When the hardware vendors don&#x27;t participate in the open-source process, it takes the community quite a lot of time to clean things up enough to be merged upstream. Usually by the time that happens the vendors will have secretly changed all the guts of the model with completely incompatible hardware at least once.<p>Just requiring a new model number for new hardware would get rid of most of the confusion. If the router and chipset vendors would actually maintain their operating systems as flavors of <i>current</i> OpenWRT instead of 5+ year old private branches, most of the problems wouldn&#x27;t exist in the first place.