[short_throw]

I'm like you, Asus router on stock firmware and happy. In my case I set that up after a bad experience with openwrt.

Years ago I bought a $100 gigabit Linksys router, immediately flashed it with openwrt, and set it up. I assumed my isp was the reason my download speeds were struggling to hit 100mbps (new house and network all at once), and later when I bought my first NAS I assumed hdds are just inherently slow.

I had abysmal network performance for over a year before I figured out my gigabit router was the performance bottleneck, my isp was giving me 3x what the router could handle. The reason for the terrible performance was that openwrt doesn't have the closed source binary blobs to run hardware accelerated routing, instead everything gets squeezed through the cpu, and my router couldn't do it.

So basically, many routers lose performance, in my case I got a 10x performance drop, and openwrts website is all but useless for telling you which routers to buy.

All I can say is be careful blindly installing openwrt unless your router has a CPU that's complete overkill for what you want to do...and none of the mid range consumer combined routers/access points meet that criteria.