Zero. I have cars, appliances, phones, laptops brand preferences too. I'm an industrial automation engineer, but I never developed any of these products. I like specific style of music and type of food. I never composed any music and never participated in creating a new dish recipe. If you want to know.
Likes is not the same as knowing what goes into making a product though, right?
You claim there's no difference, when in fact, there's a huge difference and that's why a lot of people, here especially, are grateful to Merlin and Voxel for keeping their products safe and up to date, since the companies behind them aren't always as proactive or at least as forthcoming with what has been updated and/or fixed.
Security patching of a router has become quite a critical thing these days, as more and more vulnerabilities are found and a lot of them are quite major issues that would allow your router to be taken over and used for malicious purposes.
I'm less worried about devices that sits behind my router, since I know that I'm at least as protected as I possibly can be, thanks to the fact that I have a device that receives regular updates.
To me, that's really a major thing and not something I take lightly these days.
The day my R7800 dies, I'd most likely go for an Asus router, as long as it's one of the devices Merlin supports.
People's Republic of China and Republic of China are both parts of the same country legally. Politics aside, if Chinese and Taiwanese "aren't very good most of the time" - Asus and TP-Link are out. Belkin's parent is Foxxcon, Taiwan - not good as well. Netgear is the only choice left from the list above.
Sorry, what?! Please, do NOT come with that BS here.
Taiwan is a country and has ZERO to do with the PRC, as it has its own government, military and so forth, so NO, they're not legally the same, whatever your twisted opinion is.
Asus has clearly taken to heart the lawsuit from the FCC and have stepped up their software efforts on the router side, but you really have to watch out what you're buying, as a lot of their products aren't properly supported and some are even worse supported than some TP-Link products.
