Cisco didn't want a threat to their lucrative enterprise market.
Imagine if they kept pumping out updated hardware supporting DD-WRT over the years, and eventually captured 80+% of the home networking market. Now consider that, during that time, a generation of future networking engineers cut their teeth on hi-po Linksys home routers, giving Linksys a segue into the lucrative enterprise market as this generation of people started gaining influence.
This ended up being one of magical events that could have been the turning point for a small, unknown company to take on a giant, and win. Instead, the opportunity was squished through a smart acquisition by Cisco.
while i understand your argument, enterprise/ISP routers have completely different functionality then home devices. most people in the network engineering field cut their teeth on enterprise gear in lower level positions.
for instance, home routers do data and control plane processing on a single CPU with no or very little NPU involved, while enterprise gear has this functionality.
not to mention the large array of technologies that are not even usable in small scale networks like VXLAN, BGP, IPVPN etc..
Actually I have found a use for VXLAN in my home network, when I was trying to set up a mesh and was finding that 802.11s support was poor and that WDS was creating annoying switching loops despite STP. So I just set up wireless links between routers, use OSPF to determine routes, set appropriate weights to prefer the 5ghz band (which periodically goes down because of DFS but otherwise gives higher throughput), and use VXLAN to create the logical network I want. It has worked extremely well for several months now and my wife is happy to not have cables going all over our house. There are probably "better" ways to do this but honestly, it works, it is flexible, and it is straightforward to extend to more routers if needed.
