But there are better and worse releases. And some releases affect some setups/routers, while other work better for some.This all comes from Asuswrt base. The reason I switched to testing Asuswrt only... before giving up completely. There no bug-free version. One thing fixed and another broken every single time release after release. All base issues eventually end up in Asuswrt-Merlin. Drivers, all TrendMicro, other proprietary components - all closed source. There was no point for me testing Asuswrt-Merlin first and then finding the same issue in base Asuswrt.
All we have now is a bunch of people filling this feedback thread with mostly useless comments like "dirty upgraded two minutes ago, all working fine, thank you Merlin *forgets to post setup*", before some days later, people start reporting of issues that occur ocationally under use. And then maybe some others say that they've experienced similar issues, but it seldom reaches any conclusive answer because most issues are intermittent, not predictable and the discussion dies out.
These might or might not be due to individual quirks in their setup, or it could be a systematic issue in the release.
So all I'm hearing in these dismissive responses are you guys indirectly making my point. But you seem fixated on the idea that I think this is some sort of scientifically rigorous lab methodology, which it is not and I don't. What I'm actually suggesting is a simple "statistical" method that can help separate the chaff from the weeds.
And then when we have reached conclusive issues, people can try the newest official firmware and if they also appear there, feedback with logs can be filed through the Asus official firmware web interface so the issues gets fixed downstream. Quite the simple but efficient procedure, really.