Routers at least are easy-ish to pick. I just look up the specs of the chipset inside that specific revision of the model (yeah, bit of a pain), and make sure i

Routers at least are easy-ish to pick. I just look up the specs of the chipset inside that specific revision of the model (yeah, bit of a pain), and make sure it works with OpenWRT or some other custom firmware. Stock firmware often doesn't even use all the features (although some have the opposite problem, due to closed source chipset drivers, like Broadcom's HW accelerated NAT).