Perhaps it would be better to just let this topic die, but I take the bait, here we go...
Have you guys seen the list of kernel patches OpenWrt devs maintain and apply:
http://git.openwrt.org/?p=15.05/openwrt … tches-3.18
Clearly, many of these are about network, performance and reducing size (to make recent kernels install and run at all on much of the supported hardware).
I could imagine OpenWrt to be more specialised/hacked/adapted/optimized for the hardware it runs on and the tasks it performs. That would make the list of patches longer, and it would be harder and harder to keep up to date with recent linux kernels. Eventually, we might get stuck with a fork of some legacy kernel (the brcm-2.4 target was essentially that).
I could also imagine OpenWrt to be more standard-linux-compliant: less patches and less tweaks.
I feel confident that our developers make tough decisions all the time about this: optimise and specialise for OpenWrt, or keep it standard and compliant. And it makes me feel confident that OpenWrt is based on a recent linux kernel. The alternative, a heavily hacked old kernel, with plenty of binary blobs, would be very hard to keep secure and updated... and new features in Linux, and new hardware, would perhaps never make it to OpenWrt.
If you want maximum performance from your router, run stock firmware on it.
Or if you don't like OpenWrt, use DD-WRT then (which is not a real linux distribution the way OpenWrt is).
I think it is amazing that I can backup my configuration from a router with a MIPS chipset, and restore it to my WDR4900 with a PowerPC chipset, or to a Linksys WRT1900 with a modern ARM chipset. Any supported device essentially behaves the same. This requires focus on what is common between the devices, not specialising in the oddities (like hardware NAT).
Finally, I have a 100Mbit down/10Mbit up internet connection. And I have a WDR4900 with one of the fastest CPUs supported by OpenWrt. I would happily pay less for slower internet, but this is the cheapest/slower my ISP offers.
What do you guys do with 1GBit, which makes it a REAL problem, that your 50Euro router, does not exploit the NAT-chip?
If you really want super fast OpenWrt, why don't you just get a cheap MiniITX box with a Quad Core x64, an extra NIC, and a Gigabit switch?
...I should probably just have kept my mouth shut...