Comment Lots of variety now (Score 1) 427
There is too much variety of hardware now for there to be any defacto model like the wrt54gl was. Back then practically the only differences were RAM and Flash sizes. Now you have choices of 100mbit vs gigabit ports, USB support or not, 802.11n vs 802.11ac, 2.4GHz only or also 5GHz, single radio vs dual radio, 1-8 MIMO stream support (affects throughput), RAM size, Flash size, lots of different SoC's running at various speeds...
You need to prioritize what features you want and then narrow down the wide variety of router models available. Most models are supported by 3rd party firmwares unless they were recently released but most will become supported eventually.