There always comes a time when vendors move their support resources from your slightly aged product to their brand-spanking new products. The hardware is fine and capable of doing so much more, but is shackled by the vendor's software.
In short, if you haven't considered user-created firmware by this stage, you really should.
By way of example, the subject shall be my venerable Linksys WRT54G router that I purchased many years ago with the firm knowledge that the firmware was upgradeable and could add features to it that Linksys would not.
Specifically, this was the ability for the router to act as a wireless networking client rather than an access point; essentially it is a movable wireless card on steroids — and the ability to play with its innards via standard Linux commands was attractive.
http://www.linuxlinks.com/portal/news/article.php?story=20090212140923349