Maybe the name LEDE is not familiar to you, but LEDE is an openwrt fork, which is essentially going to get named to openwrt again through a merge since that's where most of the openwrt work is happening. From the various open or semi-open firmware, LEDE is the most active and open I think. Various other firmware will still be quite tied to vendor binary drivers.

Tomato, DD-WRT, etc. try to be extremely user friendly. Not that LEDE doesn't, but people who have some technical expertise tend to benefit a lot more from LEDE with all their packages. Especially if you can compile an image yourself (it is pretty easy on linux), then you can have all the features tailored to your preference.

OpenWRT/LEDE firmware is nice. I think I first used it with the (original) WRT54G.

The future of the project is uncertain, however. They may or may not be around much longer.

>The future of the project is uncertain, however. They may or may not be around much longer.

Can you elaborate on this?

In a nutshell: OpenWRT existed. They kinda sorta pretty much stopped doing anything. LEDE sprang up as a fork, with several of the OpenWRT folks. Then they all decided to work together and joined back up. Now it's anybody's guess what will happen next, if anything, as nothing has really happened since.

That is not true in my experience, the LEDE site is quite active, spewing out builds very frequently, even fixing KRACK almost immediately. Don't know what you consider as "nothing has really happened"

OpenWRT is dying, but LEDE is alive and kicking hard.

The mailing lists mention LEDE will merge back to the OpenWRT branding, but that was months ago, and the OpenWRT site is funky.