[tjoff]

Sure there is a difference. If there is another exploit that gets you hashed passwords from many thousand different routers you would be quite happy knowing that none of them were salted.

Also there is a huge difference between (salt + short-random-password) and (long-random-password) because the salt isn't nearly as confidential as the password and knowing it reduces the attack vector to (short-random-password), which is trivial to break for such poor (in this context) hash algorithm.