That was my thinking with going with MerlinWRT. I splurged and got an Asus ax88u, then spent two weeks trying to get it to work before returning it. I do think part of the issue is WiFi technology is diverse enough that the latest and greatest are optimized around 5Ghz and newer specs whereas a lot of IOT (which I use) is still old school 2.4. Anyway I tried OpenWRT for a while but went back to DD-WRT on an Archer C9 which has been just about perfect for my usage.