My experience is that most consumer routers are actually developed and maintained by teams at companies you've never heard of overseas. This is partly as a resp

My experience is that most consumer routers are actually developed and maintained by teams at companies you've never heard of overseas. This is partly as a response to the engineering challenges you've outlined. Taiwan is a popular choice, due to the combination of proximity to manufacturing in China and an English friendly business culture. Every so often the big brands go shopping to build a new product and they select something that meets their needs from the white-label products available. The product then gets customised for them. What the big brands contribute is industrial design of the case, some qa, packaging, ui styling, a distribution channel and consumer trust in their name. Which leads to funny scenes like watching engineers at a white label do board relayouts and emi retesting because the industrial designer wanted the antennas to sprout out of a different bit of the case. Because it looks more badass that way... This also leads to the phenomenon where say, v4.15 of a router was cool, but 4.16 sucks - because internally its a totally different chipset, with a different os (e.g. vxworks vs Linux). Ref e.g. WRT54... The reason this happens is not because the brand name rewrote anything - they just selected a different white label partner who customised a totally different product to look the same (probably because they promised to deliver cheaper for same SKU). This then gets sold under the old, popular model name.