I'm not convinced that I would choose Merlin, because it only supports a very limited amount of devices. However, I had Asus routers in the past and they were not half bad.

If you don't need USB and could switch to OpenWRT, you could go for a Netgear WAX 202 - I got a used one for 50 bucks, pretty stable so far. Or maybe a TP-Link AX 1800 for 60 bucks new.