Why did not they add the features to OpenWrt trying to make it better?
Almost all the forks of OpenWrt die in months. Some lasted only few years. I am afraid that it is a wasted effort.
I think mainline openwrt runs on turris hardware now. From what I remember, the main feature of their fork is/was snapshot management through btrfs. Updates are quite lacking in general on openwrt, so I think it's good that they are doing something about it. Ideally, I would like to run a full distro on routers, and manage it through standard distro tools, now that we have reasonably powerful hardware (like the Turris).