Well I finally bought the E4200v1 and opted for custom fw after countless hours and $$ wasted dealing with the instability of the DIR-655 and Asus RT-N56U; however it seems custom firmware has issues with stability too.
I initially tried the stock firmware which was ok (relatively) but still pretty unstable at times. So i tried the dd-wrt firmware (kingkong— several others were unstable) but that just completely killed the internet off after a week (tried resetting both router and modem to no avail) and so I tried Shibby 1.28 firmware which was fairly stable but I couldn't for the life of me get a grasp on the QOS settings which meant atrocious lag in games. Followed by this, I tried the Toastman firmware which fixed the lag issues (used the B/W limited in QOS menu); however, this to my unfortunate surprise was a pretty unstable firmware and the network went haywire —constantly dropping out every 15 seconds or so. I am now going to try out the Victek firmware and see if hopefully that is somewhat different but so far things don't look too good.
Just wondering if any1 could shed some light on these issues.
Maybe ill have to opt for mikrotik in the future.
PS: I might give Shibby another try though since I feel i missed the B/W limited tool somewhere. Thanks for reading.