Horses for courses, I guess. For my purposes, Asus-Merlin does not even come close to cutting it - and I have ran it before on a couple of different devices. A

Horses for courses, I guess. For my purposes, Asus-Merlin does not even come close to cutting it - and I have ran it before on a couple of different devices. Asus routers are what's underwhelming in my experience - very unreliable and if you buy anything that's been on the market for <1-2y you never know which one will end up an expensive paper-weight down the line and which one will have decent support. The chipset vendor - avoid Broadcom - is a decent heuristic but not 100%. YMMV but the GL-AP1300 improved throughput, coverage and reliability significantly compared to my old RT-AC66U (which is one of the Asus devices that can actually run OpenWRT without jumping through hoops).