Companies roll their own, I think, because of a combination of Not Invented Here and secret-sauce binary blobs. They work within the script that the chipset/radio maker gives them to follow.

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They don't often offer inexpensive, deliberately-hackable units like the WRT54GL, I think, because of support costs.

And by "support costs," I don't mean that it was expensive to hold users' hands while they installed custom firmware -- that's never been a service that has been provided.

Instead, I mean that there are people who start goofing with this stuff and run out of skill when hacking close-ish to the metal on this kind of hardware. They don't know how to get themselves out of a jam and unbrick their device.

So they find a way to lie their way into getting an RMA and get the device replaced under warranty, and that's expensive for companies to deal with.

(Those people fucking suck.)