[darryl42]

dd-wrt has gotten pretty bad. They don't publish new releases anymore you just pick a daily build from one of the random people who publish builds and hope it doesn't brick your router. Learned this after bricking my router :(

[shmerl]

I think their main developer (Brainslayer) publishes his builds periodically. So those aren't random people. But in general it's not really a fully open development project. I.e. it's not governed by any community.

OpenWRT is better in this sense, but even there some people split into recent LEDE project: https://www.lede-project.org

Regarding bricking. Linksys WRT1900ACS is designed with that in mind. It has two partitions, and you always flash updates to another one, so if something goes wrong, you can easily switch to the other partition which will hold previous installation, using special on / off sequence. It's a neat idea, and more routers should follow it.