There are better options. There are custom firmwares available such as Tomato, OpenWRT, FreeWRT and DDWRT. These all have more dedicated developers issuing regular updates and are generally more secure, current and feature complete than the original firmwares. Many of these are open source and have active communities even. Problem is that these all require some technical knowledge to install. Some are pretty simple though and can be installed once by a semi-technical person then left alone. But that's not enough for mass adoption.

What we need is more manufacturers simply to give up on developing router firmware and simply pay the devs on these quality projects to do the work for them. They've proven their dedication and can surely adapt to new hardware with relative ease. Some router manufacturers are already doing this. I know at least Buffalo was for some time.