Care to explain why a product that does what it's supposed to is terrible to sell in today's world?

I believe it was a sardonic expression on bucking the inexorable trend towards consumerism and recurring-purchase/subscriptions

For me, it’s primarily because this device has stood still while faster, cheaper, more powerful devices with lower power consumption and more fully open-source firmwares have entered the marketplace.

The WRT54GL doesn’t have a fully open firmware—the WiFi remains closed—and has so little RAM and flash that OpenWRT, that started with the WRT54G, no longer supports it. DD-WRT is creeping in the same direction.

IPv6 support is more off than on. It’s never going to support DoT, WPA3, or other modern security measures. Most of the world is urbanized, and in an urban setting it’s a bit rude to use 54 Mbps 802.11g on the 2.4 GHz channels.

If you’re using it for an internal network on a farm, it’s fine, but if you’re in today’s world then you need to support today’s protocols.

How is it rude? The 2.4 GHz channel is open for all to use as they please as long as they comply with power limits.

I live in a residential neighbourhood, my router has both 5 GHz ac and 2.4 GHz. I run it in 2.4 GHz 802.11n mode.

In terms of raw data rate, each byte of data on 802.11g takes the airtime of about 3 bytes on 802.11n. Since 2.4 GHz WiFi penetrates obstacles so well, that’s airtime that you’re excluding from up to several nearby homes if you generate traffic on 802.11g.

I've been on 'n' mode for awhile, but even if I was only 'g' why should I care considering there are neighbors that use 40 Hz channels on the 2.4 band? Or neighbors that set their channel to other than 1,6,11?

Arguably worse!

Correct, you don’t need to care. But the commons only needs to be a tragedy if you let it be a tragedy.

Just because others behave badly or worse doesn’t give you the moral right to do badly.

We don’t need to be perfect. If everybody did as politely as we could, and did what we could to help others behave as politely as they could, then I think everybody would be better off. Well, “polite” is not quite a direct translation of the concept I have in mind… I’m not sure how to communicate it in English.

To be honest, you're using a small fraction of the available wireless networking bandwidth available in 2020.

54Mbps vs 600Mbps for just 2.4Ghz, and using 5Ghz gets you to over 1Gbps.

Not accounting for real world losses/overhead, but that would hold true for the WRT54G.

Products need to fail or become undesirable to use after 3 years so you buy a new one.

This one works 14 years without issue.

Except that 2 times was crashed and then start with blank settings.

Thus making the supplier $60 over 14 years.

Sell a whizzy router with go fast blue LEDs for $150 that dies after 3 years and you make $750 in 15 years.

Advertise it with some “value add” MITM dns hijacking by default and you can even get a recurrent revenue stream on top of it. Bundle it as “Internet security” and you can charge bothe the customer and the advertiser.

Actually much more than $60...

I've purchase other Linksys stuff and few mine friends bought new routers because of mine recommendation.

But that was before they switch to VxWorks OS. Once they switch i didn't recommend them anymore.